Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York a Sensation in France and a Political Antihero in Russia

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Guardian (London) . A thrilling page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russias most controversial figures. This is how Emmanuel Carrère the magnetic journalist novelist filmmaker and chameleon describes his subject: Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum then a multimillionaires butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes. He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag: I suspend my judgment on the matter. Its a dangerous life an ambiguous life: a real adventure novel. It is also I believe a life that says something. Not just about him Limonov not just about Russia but about all our history since the end of the Second World War.. So Eduard Limonov isnt fictional-but he might as well be. This pseudobiography isnt a novel but it reads like one: from Limonovs grim childhood to his desperate comical ultimately successful attempts to gain the respect of Russias literary intellectual elite; to his immigration to New York then to Paris; to his return to the motherland. Limonov could be read as a charming picaresque. But it could also be read as a troubling counternarrative of the second half of the twentieth century one that reveals a violence an anarchy a brutality that the stories we tell ourselves about progress tend to conceal.