Lives Other Than My Own
Finished reading Emmanuel Carrère's Lives Other Than My Own tonight. Impressed by his careful portraits of loss, a child to the tsunami at Sri Lanka, and a wife and mother to cancer. The writing is not just empathetic but keenly aware of the limits of empathy. He is hard on himself, particularly on his writerly egotism, especially in the earlier chapters. One wishes that either he complicates that simple self-criticism or amplifies it with detail and illustration, but perhaps the latter choice would have tipped the delicate balance of the book. As it is, the two sections are not equal and only tenuously linked by his presence in both situations, but the tenuousness of life is also what the book explores. “The truth is we don’t know what goes on at the last minute; there must be lives that only seem to be failures, that find their meaning in extremis or whose value we have simply missed. There must also be lives that seem a success but are living hells, perhaps even at the end, ...