Tag: fiction

Carrère, Camus, and the Soviet Kommunalka

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

I finished reading Renaud Camus’s Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings. It’s an excellent book but there was something in it that shocked me. And it wasn’t a text by Camus. It was a letter written to Camus by another French writer, the mega best-selling novelist Emmanuel Carrère. I have written about Carrère here, if anybody needs a recap. In short, Carrère is a talentless hack and a Putin-loving lefty who accuses everybody of being a Nazi while praising actual, self-described Nazis like Eduard Limonov.

In his letter to Renaud Camus, Carrère chides the philosopher for his belief that there are way too many migrants in France. He says that if a horde (his word, not mine) of African migrants were to invade his apartment, he would not complain because such an act would bring about global justice. Carrère also says that the French have absolutely no right to live in France that supersedes the right of any recent arrival to live there. Not only does he find no validity in the nation-state, he seems unaware that such a concept even exists.

In response to Carrère’s fantasy of a horde of Senegalese and Afghanis moving into his beautiful apartment and exiling him and his family into one single room while they rubbish up the rest of the place, Camus, who is intellectually on a much higher level, responds that what Carrère seeks is the repetition of the Soviet kommunalka. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, normal people were forced to accept families of uncultured peasants moving into their apartments. The owners would be relegated to one tiny room and would have to co-exist with drunk, chaotic, nasty lumpenproletarians who would blow their noses into the curtains and spit on the floor. If Carrère were at least a bit educated, he’d know that his dream was already put into practice and led to very bad results.

Carrère is very famous in France. His books sell amazingly well. He is considered a true intellectual authority in spite of being a very weak writer and a shallow person. The mega-well-read Camus, in the meantime, is banned, cancelled, and persecuted by the country’s legal apparatus for wrongthink. Another significant difference between them is that the untalented but rich Carrère is a Putinoid and the intelligent, massively banned Camus is pro-Ukrainian. This cannot possibly be any other way because birds of a globalist feather flock together, and Carrère has natural sympathies towards the aggressively neoliberal goals of Putin’s Russia.

Book Notes: Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Emily Wharton’s relatives are horrified by her plan to marry Ferdinand Lopez. He is not a British gentleman, and the Wharton family is convinced that the marriage will be a disaster. Emily disagrees because Ferdinand is living like (or, as we would say today, identifies as) a British gentleman, and that’s just as good. Or is it?

To her horror, Emily soon discovers that living like and identifying as are not the same as being. A British gentleman is a historically, culturally and temperamentally circumscribed entity. Try as he might, Ferdinand cannot keep the pretense of being “just like” one but unfortunately he and Emily are already married, and she cannot escape.

Unlike many 19th-century authors, Trollope was a master at creating profound, nuanced and memorable male characters. The European novel is replete with interesting female heroines, which is not surprising since, in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were written primarily for female audiences. We all know the names of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Fortunata and Jacinta, Eugénie Grandet, Jane Eyre, Clarissa, Pamela, and many others. Of course, there are also Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Mauprat but one of them is a shipwreck, two are children, and the fourth you probably never heard of.

Trollope buckles the trend and gives us a large cast of complicated, strong, sometimes nasty and often deeply admirable men. In The Prime Minister, we once again meet my favorite male character of all times, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium. Trollope was great at creating meaningful character names. You don’t need to think hard to understand the social and economic status of somebody called the Duke of Omnium who lives at Gatherum Castle.

In a previous post, I talked about Plantagenet Palliser when he was a young husband who goes to heroic lengths to save his marriage to a capricious, self-indulgent woman. In The Prime Minister, Palliser is now my age and holds the highest political office in the land. His wife is as emotionally incontinent and demanding as always and tries to meddle aggressively in the way the Prime Minister runs his government. He has to keep her lovingly at bay while preserving his sense of duty and dignity both in his marriage and his public career.

I cannot think of another author who wrote about male friendships, male mentorships, and male interests as much and as beautifully as Trollope. What it means to be a husband, a father, a brother, a colleague were the issues that he explored time and again in his beautiful, long novels. The world of Trollope’s books is long gone but what a fascinating world it was. I am not sure we have gained much by leaving it so completely behind.