The work is purely autobiographical, so it is not a novel as the title suggests, perhaps ironically. We know that since The Adversary, Carrère has renounced fiction, and that's good, but it does not fall into the trap of narcissistic or chaotic many of these stories. The story told is cut in order to keep an appropriate thread for the reader. Here, all the failures and indecision of the author are built around different themes, pretty well connected. The story of the grandfather roughly collaborator, the academician mother who wants to stifle history, the vicissitudes of his love affair with Sophie, the incredible new erotic story published in Le Monde, to be read in the train where it is supposed to go through the same Sophie the day of the release, but stops short and causes setbacks in series, shooting a documentary film Kotelnitch Back to Kotelnitch, a small town in Russia where "there nothing happens. " The fight scene with his campaign is poignant truth, it shows how we react and over-react when we are carried away by emotions to the point of no longer distinguish reality from fiction. Carrère not trying to be as friendly, it is the least we can say that risk of course cost him some characters with which avid readers identify with. Finally, facing the secret shame and family maintained by his mother, but that is the first victim, the author relies on the liberating of speech. But when at the end of the book, the author meets another Helen, who is always the last I heard his current partner (or even later in More lives than mine), it even states that it has the same first name as her mother.
