Russian on his mother’s side, Carrère has no particular affinity for the nation. As a child, he learned Russian from his nana, his nurse-governess, and considers it a beautiful language. As an adult, he has forgotten his “beautiful Russian,’’ as his mother called it. So, he tries to relearn the language in preparation for his trips. This love of the language is a leitmotif that runs throughout the book, and often takes the form of haunting Russian lullabies.
Don’t let the lullabies fool you: This is no wimpy biography. Memoirs often meander; some are filled with half-baked or overdone tell-all anguish, guilt, and soul-searching that are hard to digest. But this memoir blends its confessional ingredients and somewhat cloying childhood memories with action, suspense, and exotic detail to construct a tale that is often sensual and always intriguing.
It begins with Carrère’s erotic dream on a train to Kotelnich, Russia. Carrère has temporarily left Sophie, a jealous sort, in France. He’s traveling with a film crew, to do a documentary (under the watchful eyes of a Russian security officer) on the last living prisoner from World War II, a Hungarian who spent a few years in a POW camp and 53 years in a psychiatric hospital in Kotelnich. Carrère sees parallels between that prisoner and his own grandfather. Thus, this trip to Russia inspires Carrère to return to Kotelnich with only a few fuzzy ideas about doing a documentary on Russian life and a need to discover more about his Russian grandfather, Georges Zurabichvili.
