Ultimately, it hardly matters whether Emmanuel Carrère tells the truth or not. He has always sworn that he does, presenting himself as a "documentary writer," insisting that good literature cannot lie... He makes a big deal of it, yet it matters little, at least for us, his readers. From the perspective of those close to him, that's another story; there is pain in the air. Still, we would love his books even if everything in them were false. For a long time now, we have been identifying, not with Carrère himself, but with the character who says "I" in his writings, and it doesn't matter if that "I" is not entirely him. All we ask is that he continue to move us, to make us laugh and cry, to draw us in. That character speaks to us personally; we wait for what comes next, for him to tell us more about his life, his anxiety about death, his failed loves, his struggle to write.

Death, love and writing. These three themes intertwine once again in Kolkhoze [to be published on August 28 in France, not yet translated into English]. Returning to the death of his mother, the renowned Russian historian and perpetual secretary of the Académie Française, France's most prestigious literary institution, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse (1929–2023), with whom he had a difficult relationship, the narrator searches for the love that must have connected them despite everything. He ponders how this bond has influenced, or rather, disoriented, his work as a writer, leaving it open to wavering melancholy and a lucid kind of depression. In short, it leaves us with everything we love about him and enjoy finding, one book after another.

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