Soviet emigre turns sour

Press, 22 September 1984, Page 20

Soviet emigre turns sour

It’s me, Eddie. A fictional memoir. By Edward Limonov. Translated from the Russian by S. L Campbell. Picador/Pan, 1983. 264 pp. $8.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by<

John Goodliffe)

Edward Limonov, yet another Russian literary export, began his career as a poet, publishing eight volumes of samizdat verse in the U.S.S.R. “Samizdat” means “selfpublishing.” The poems were printed unofficially and illegally and circulated “underground.” In 1974 Limonov left the Soviet Union and settled in New York where he did a variety of jobs: waiter, tailor, steelworker, furniture remover, caretaker. He now lives in Paris.

“It’s me, Eddie,” based on the New York experience, was first published in Russian in the United States in 1979. Its outspokenness caused something of a scandal in Russian emigre circles. Limonov, adopting the persona of a kind of punk Henry Miller, deliberately sets out to shock with his graphic descriptions of hetero- and homosexual encounters, and his determination to hurl foul-mouthed abuse at the American urban way of life which, judging by his book, he found as repellent as life in the Soviet Union. Both East and West “civilisations” are shown to ignore the heeds of the individual human being and Limonov howls and curses like a caged animal, asserting his individuality in the only way he finds possible, through his bisexuality and his writing. “Stuff the world, I want to get off! A plague on both your houses!” That sums up his attitude to life.

Reading the book is not a comfortable experience. Limonov seems to revel in nastiness and spares no sensibilities in the descriptions of the most sordid aspects of American high and low life, and of his own sexual experiences. There were times when I found myself quite nauseated. Perhaps I was meant to. But I am also presumably meant to feel a certain sympathy for Eddie in his desperate search for an identity. Limonov makes his reader painfully aware of the problems of an emigre writer who has lost his roots. But the unabated stream of four-letter-worded abuse ultimately becomes repetitive and wearisome. Sympathy gives way to impatience. I confess to a certain bias against a

work subtitled “a fictional memoir.” It suggests not only that the author wants the best of both worlds, but also that his sincerity may not be above suspicion. “Methinks he doth protest too much,” and methinks too that he may well have written as he did from somewhat mercenary motives. A mere essay which expressed the author’s anarchic view of life would not have sold as well as a “fictional memoir” where the so-called “philosophy” is highly spiced with graphic and salacious detail for the prurient The back-cover blurb describes the book as “screamingly funny yet enormously sad,” and quotes “Publishers’ Weekly” as calling it “refreshingly honest” Screamingly funny? No. Refreshing? No. Honest? I wonder. Sad? Yes. Sad that a gifted writer should apparently feel that he could survive only by producing a book like this.