Emmanuel Carrère’s obsession with his mother’s duplicity borders on fanaticism
From our UK edition
In our family histories we all have ghosts, but few of us go in search of them and even fewer of us write about them. The French author Emmanuel Carrère discovered how devastating that search can be with his book My Life as a Russian Novel (2007). For two years he and his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, an eminent historian of Russia and the steely secretary of the Académie Française, didn’t speak. Hélène’s aggrieved response to the publication of her son’s inquiry into the suspected status of her father, Georges Zurabishvili, as a collaborator of the Nazis during the second world war, shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
