Lives Other Than My Own: A Memoir - Softcover

Carrère, Emmanuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250013771 ISBN 13: 9781250013774

Publisher: Picador, 2012

Synopsis

From the acclaimed, award-winning author Emmanuel Carrère, Lives Other Than My Own: A Memoir is an act of generous imagination that unflinchingly records devastating loss and, equally vividly, the wealth of human solace that follows in its wake.

Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

In Sri Lanka, a tsunami sweeps a child out to sea, her grandfather helpless against the onrushing water. In France, a young woman succumbs to illness, leaving her husband and small children bereft. Present at both events, Emmanuel Carrère sets out to tell the story of two families―shattered and ultimately restored. What he accomplishes is nothing short of a literary miracle: a heartrending narrative of endless love, a meditation on courage and decency in the face of adversity, an intimate and reverent look at the extraordinary beauty and nobility of ordinary lives.

Precise, sober, and suspenseful, as full of twists and turns as any novel, Lives Other Than My Own confronts terrifying catastrophes to illuminate the astonishing richness of human connection: a grandfather who thought he had found paradise―too soon―and now devotes himself to helping his neighbors rebuild their village; a husband so in love with his ailing wife that he carries her in his arms like a knight does his princess; and finally, Carrère himself, longtime chronicler of the tormented self, who unexpectedly finds consolation and even joy as he immerses himself in the lives of others.

“Moving...Carrère’s prose is precise and measured...Through interviews with friends and relatives of both families, he creates powerful portraits that celebrate ordinary lives.”―The New Yorker

“You begin this memoir thinking it will be about one thing, and it turns into something else altogether―a book at once more ordinary and more extraordinary than any first impressions might allow.”―The New York Times

About this title

About the Author:

Emmanuel Carrère, novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and biographer, is the award-winning internationally renowned author of The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), Lives Other Than My Own, My Life As A Russian Novel, Class Trip and The Mustache. Carrère lives in Paris.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

The night before the wave, I remember that Hélène and I talked about separating. It wouldn't be complicated; we didn't live together, hadn't had a child, and were even able to see ourselves remaining friends, and yet, it was sad. It was Christmas 2004. Here we were in our bungalow at the Hotel Eva Lanka, and we couldn't help remembering a different night, just after we'd met, a night we'd spent marveling that we had found each other and would never part, and would grow old together, happy for the rest of our lives. We even talked about having a child, a little girl. We did have that little girl in the end, and we still trust that we'll live out our days together. We like to think we always knew that everything would work out. But after the dazzling confidence of love at first sight came a complex, chaotic year, and what had at first seemed so certain to us (and still seems so now) no longer appeared at all certain or even desirable on that Christmas in 2004. On the contrary, we were convinced that this vacation would be our last together and that, for all our good intentions, the trip had been a mistake. Lying side by side, we couldn't bring ourselves to mention that first night and the promising future we had longed for so fervently yet seemed somehow to have lost. We were simply watching ourselves draw apart, without hostility, but with regret. It was too bad. For the umpteenth time I spoke of my inability to love, all the more remarkable in that Hélène is truly worthy of love. While I was telling myself that I would have to grow old alone, Hélène had something else to worry about: just before our departure, her sister Juliette had been hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism, and Hélène was afraid Juliette might be seriously ill or even dying. Although I insisted such fears were irrational, Hélène could not shake them off, and I resented how she had let herself become absorbed in something that excluded me. She went out on the terrace to smoke a cigarette. I waited for her, lying on the bed and thinking, If she comes back soon, if we make love, then perhaps we won't separate, perhaps we will grow old together after all. But she did not come back. She remained alone on the terrace watching the sky gradually grow lighter, listening to the birds begin to sing, and I fell asleep on my side of the bed, sad, lonely, convinced that my life could only get worse and worse.

*   *   *

Hélène and her son, I and mine: all four of us had signed up for a scuba lesson at the dive club in the neighboring village. Since the last session, however, my Jean-Baptiste had developed an earache and didn't want to go anymore. Tired from our almost sleepless night, Hélène and I decided to cancel the lesson. Rodrigue, the only one who'd really wanted to go diving, was disappointed. You can always go swimming in the pool, Hélène told him. Well, he'd had it up to here with swimming in the pool. He would have at least liked for someone to accompany him down to the beach below the hotel, where he wasn't allowed to go alone because of the dangerous currents, but no one wanted to go with him, neither his mother nor I, nor Jean-Baptiste, who preferred to read in the boys' bungalow. Jean-Baptiste was thirteen at the time. I had more or less forced this exotic vacation on him, a holiday with a woman he hardly knew and a boy much younger than he was, and he'd been bored from the moment we arrived, which he made clear to us by staying off on his own. Whenever I asked him irritably whether he wasn't happy to be here in Sri Lanka, he replied grudgingly that yes, yes, he was happy, but it was too hot and actually he was happiest in the bungalow, reading or playing his Game Boy. In short, he was a typical adolescent, while I was a typical father of an adolescent, catching myself telling him the same exasperating things my own parents had said to me when I was his age: You ought to go out, look around ... What's the point of bringing you all this way?... Like talking to a wall. So Jean-Baptiste retreated into his lair while Rodrigue, left on his own, began bothering Hélène, who was trying to nap on a deck chair by the huge saltwater pool, where an elderly but incredibly athletic German woman who resembled Leni Riefenstahl swam every morning for two hours. As for me, still feeling sorry for myself over my inability to love, I went to hang out with the Ayurvedics, as we called the group of Swiss German guests who were staying in some nearby bungalows. They had come to the resort to follow a program of yoga and traditional Indian massage. They weren't meeting in plenary session with their master, so I performed a few asanas with them. Then I wandered back to the pool, where the last breakfast dishes had been cleared and tables were being set for lunch. Soon the tedious question would arise: What should we do that afternoon? In the three days since our arrival we had already visited the forest temple, fed the little monkeys, and seen the reclining Buddhas. So unless we undertook more ambitious cultural excursions, which none of us found tempting, we had exhausted the attractions in our immediate vicinity. Some tourists can spend days in a fishing village rhapsodizing over everything the locals do—going to market, mending nets, social rituals of all kinds—and I reproached myself for not being like that, for not having passed on to my sons the generous curiosity, the acuity of observation I admire in people like Nicolas Bouvier, the Swiss traveler and writer. I'd brought along The Scorpion-Fish, Bouvier's account of a year he spent in Galle, a large fortified town about thirty kilometers to the east of us along the southern coast of the island. Unlike his most famous book, The Way of the World, a tale of celebration and wonder, The Scorpion-Fish describes collapse, loss, and a descent into the abyss. It presents Sri Lanka as a form of enchantment, but in the perilous sense of the word, not some guidebook come-on for newlyweds and hip backpackers. Bouvier almost lost his mind there, and our visit, whether considered as a honeymoon or a rite of passage for a future blended family, was a failure. And a feeble failure at that, with no bang, only a whimper. I was growing anxious to go home. Crossing the trellised lobby invaded by bougainvilleas, I ran into a frustrated hotel guest who couldn't send a fax because the power was out. At the reception desk he'd heard there'd been an accident, some problem in the village, but he hadn't understood exactly what was wrong and just hoped the power would come back on soon, because his fax was very important. I rejoined Hélène, who was awake now and told me something strange was happening.

*   *   *

The next scene: a small gathering of guests and staff on a terrace at the end of the hotel grounds, looking out over the ocean. Curiously enough, nothing seems amiss at first. Everything appears normal. Then you start to notice how strange things really are. The water seems so far away ... Normally, there are about twenty yards of beach between the ocean's edge and the foot of the cliff. Now, however, the sand stretches off into the distance: flat, gray, glistening in the hazy sunshine, like Mont-Saint-Michel at low tide. Then you realize that the sand is littered with objects, but you can't tell what size they are. That piece of twisted wood, is it a broken branch or a whole tree? A really big tree? That crumpled boat, perhaps that's something a bit bigger, maybe an honest-to-god trawler, shattered and tossed aside like a nutshell? There is no sound; no breath of air rustles the fronds of the coconut palms. I don't remember the first words spoken in the group we'd joined, but at one point someone murmured in English, Two hundred children died in the village school.

*   *   *

Built on the cliff overlooking the ocean, the hotel seems swathed in the exuberant vegetation of its grounds. To reach the coastal road, guests go through a guarded gate and down a concrete ramp, at the foot of which some tuk-tuks are usually waiting. Tuk-tuks are auto rickshaws, canvas-roofed motorbikes that seat two passengers, three if they squeeze together, on short trips of up to ten kilometers; for anything more, a taxi is best. There are no tuk-tuks today. Hélène and I have come down to the road to find out what's going on. Whatever it is seems serious, but except for the man who mentioned the two hundred dead children (and was immediately contradicted by someone claiming the children couldn't have been in school because it was Poya, the Buddhist celebration of the full moon), no one at the hotel knows anything more than we do. No tuk-tuks; no passersby, either. Ordinarily there's a constant stream: women walking in twos or threes with their packages, schoolchildren in impeccably ironed white shirts, everyone smiling and eager to chat. Aside from the lack of people, nothing seems different about the road, as long as we walk beside the hill shielding us from the ocean. The moment we pass the hill and reach the plain, we discover that to one side everything is normal—trees, flowers, low walls, small shops—while on the other it's sheer devastation, a mire of blackish mud like a lava flow. After walking a few more minutes toward the village, we see a tall blond man in a torn shirt and shorts coming toward us, haggard, covered in mud and blood. He is Dutch: strangely, that is the first thing he tells us. The second thing is that his wife has been injured. Some villagers have taken her in and he's seeking help, which he hopes to find at our hotel. There was an immense wave, he says, that poured in and then receded, washing away people and houses. He appears to be in shock, more stupefied than relieved at still being alive. Hélène offers to go with him to the hotel, where the phone may be working again, and perhaps there'll be a doctor among the guests...

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1250013771
• ISBN 13: 9781250013774
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256