Over the last year or so I’ve listened to the NY Times Book Review weekly podcast. It stimulates my interest in fiction and has introduced me to new writers and books. For about 15 minutes at the end of each podcast three or four NY Times reviewers discuss books they’ve recently read. Their freestyle banter comparing and discussing various apparently well-known writers has mostly resulted feelings of my total inadequacy, as I’ve rarely even heard of those authors or books. But, I need the humility and I keep listening and learning.
The fall of 2017 somehow found the reviewers all coincidentally reading Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrere, as well as several other Carrere books. They themselves began to joke about the weird coincidence of coming to the weekly discussion with a Carrere book in their hands, and they finally began to pretend to avoid even discussing Lives since it seemed just so, you know, clannish within their little reading group. Nevertheless, even with all the handwringing about being Carrere-centric, they all agreed that Lives Other Than My Own is so beautiful, so apt, so perfect. Their discussion about Lives occurred even though the book has been out since 2009.
Having not even heard of Carrere, I decided I had to read it. Readers, you may not believe me, but I fully intended to revel in the book, to join my new well-read, book-world NYT digital friends in the land of good books. It didn’t work for me.
Lives is relatively short, an easy read. It opens in Sri Lanka with the immediate survivors of the 2004 tsunami. I join Pamela Paul (@pamelapaul) of the NY Times in being a bit obsessed with tsunamis, so it is a nice hook into the reader. And that part of the book, roughly the first 3rd, is quite good. Most of the people (meaning Europeans visiting Sri Lanka) survive, but some die. Carrere, writing in first person narrative of himself, writes in a beautiful easy-flowing style that effortlessly brings the reader into the experience. Several times I blinked away moist eyes as survivors unexpectedly find each other alive or find their loved ones dead.
The book then leaves Sri Lanka for France, home of the author, and the author decides to chronicle the life of his partner’s younger sister, Juliette, and her family and friends, as she dies of breast cancer in her mid-30s. Juliette is a judge in France, and she has a brilliant male colleague who is also a judge, and they do brilliant legal consumer law work together by helping the working-class poor do legal battle against avaricious creditors.
Carrere apparently views his personal legacy as a bit of a grumpy author, writing of dark subjects and unhappy events. Clearly, he has found a wonderful woman in Helene, his new partner, and he has begun to see the good in the people of his life. The book is charitable and positive to the lives of others.
He clearly wanted to write a book demonstrating his new power of charity, and he needed a subject. For us, dear readers, yes, a tsunami works! But no, unfortunately the legal analysis of European Union consumer credit law by brilliant jurists doesn’t work.
The angle is this: Juliette’s legs are nearly paralyzed from childhood cancer, but she is beautiful, kind and nurturing, and falls in love with a handsome, kind and nurturing cartoonist who romantically carries her in his arms whenever they encounter stairs. She works as a judge in small claims court. They have three beautiful daughters, but then she dies within months of a recurrence of cancer. Meanwhile, there is another judge in the same small claims court who, no fooling, lost a leg to childhood cancer. They find each other as soul mates and – and here we go, get ready for an affair – love their work together on behalf of poor debtors. What? No, really, that’s it – and they, in fact, have only touched each other twice by shaking hands, once when they met and once on Juliette’s deathbed.
I get this. And, I was moved by the openness all involved, and by the generosity of the author and the guileless love of the family members he interviewed for this story. What we could do without is the discussion, for about 25% of the book, of the consumer legal theories discovered by these two platonic friends. I wonder whether Carrere might be one of those people drawn to the intricacies of litigation, often because they confuse legal theory with moral theory. Carrere finds statutory analysis and jurisdictional prerogatives to be fascinating. I do not. The human stories affected by the legal system are interesting, but the legal system itself is not. In fact, the character of Etienne, the judge friend of Juliette, seems the person least clearly captured by Carrere, and the sad story of Juliette and her family would have been better served without the lengthy legal digression.
The person I like most in this book is Carrere himself. He is an empathetic listener, he is tough on himself, and he observes little details of emotion and meaning. I like him because he is honest in a way that most of us can secretly appreciate. Early on, as his partner is increasingly distraught over the illness of her sister, Carrere allows that he himself feels bad for her sister, but then again he only thinks about the sister when his partner mentions her. In fact, he tells us of his disappointment when he was obliged to call off a fabulous trip to a conference in Hong Kong because the sister has taken a turn for the worse. Can we all relate to that disappointment? Hope I’m not the only one…
In the end, the book disappoints. Carrere is very easy writer to enjoy, but it appears that he needed to write a book and didn’t have a novel-length story at hand. So, he turned a novella about the tsunami into a novel by adding an unrelated family health odyssey. I recommend the first novella, but not the second.
Lives Other Than My Own, by Emmanuel Carrere, translated by Linda Coverdale, 2009.
Bob Fall 