A Russian Novel is a tricksy little number. A quick perusal of the cover is enough to give the impression that, especially as it weighs in at a svelt 250 pages, this is a book that you could probably throw quite a lot further than you ought to trust. First up, as the blurb reveals, this isn’t a novel in the conventional sense. It’s a memoir, ‘weaving fact and fiction, travelogue and an erotically charged game of cat-and-mouse’, in which the noted French author and film director Emmanuel Carrère ‘builds fictions from his own life, inflicting his plots on lovers and family on the way’.

This places the reader on unsteady ground – is it meant to be true or isn’t it? – not least because the overriding impression throughout A Russian Novel is that it’s all a bit contrived. Throughout, the meta-radar of the long-suffering reader of postmodern fiction will be on red alert. In a Pirandellian gesture, the book tells the story of Carrère the author/character in search of a plot. Ostensibly this search takes the form of a series of trips to make a documentary film about life in the bleak Siberian town of Kotelnich. However, this is really a smokescreen from behind which Carrère delves into his past – and endures the tribulations of his present – as he searches within his own experiences for the real story that he wishes to tell. That search, ironically enough, becomes the plot of A Russian Novel.

The trips to Russia are partly an attempt to come to terms with Carrère’s own family history. His grandfather, we are told, was a Russian émigré in Paris who was arrested as a Nazi collaborator and never seen again. Carrère’s mother, a well-known academic, has been haunted by the secret, which she has concealed her entire life. However, the narcissistic search for a story that draws Carrère further into his own private history is interrupted by a brutal and unexpected incursion of the present. Anya, a young woman whom he and the film crew befriend while they are in Kotelnich, is murdered along with her baby. In a cruel twist of irony that Carrère is unflinching enough to confront, from the point of view of the documentary he is making, the murder is structurally fortuitous. Whereas the footage Carrère and his crew had thus far shot was aimless and seemed to be heading for failure, the murder provides the narrative destination that makes it all cohere.

Meanwhile, Carrère is engaged in an extravagantly intense, mutually destructive relationship with his girlfriend, Sophie. In a move that bears all the hallmarks of meta-fictional playfulness, this particular plotline hinges on a mise en abyme. Carrère is asked to write a short story to be published in Le Monde. In an act of literary showmanship, he decides to publish, under the guise of a story, an erotic letter to Sophie. The story is intended as a stunt, an act of ‘performative literature’, in which Carrère controls Sophie’s every move. Sophie will read the story on a specific train at a specific time on a specific day – she will even be sitting in a specific seat. All of this will be revealed to the other passengers who are reading Carrère’s story in Le Monde on the train that day. What’s more, Carrère’s story will be such a major turn-on for all concerned that they will take it in turns to surreptitiously masturbate in the toilet.

So far so clever, chic and, well, French. A Russian Novel reads rather like a nouveau roman – slowly marinated in theory, smugly self-reflexive, and forcing the reader to take on an active role in working out what did and didn’t really happen. If you were that way inclined, you could write a neat essay on how the parts fit together, plots mirroring sub-plots, events mirroring memories, to achieve a clever artistic effect. However, here’s the punch line: it seems like most of this actually did happen.

Exhibit A: Carrère’s story within a story was actually published in 2002 as a stand-alone piece in Le Monde. What’s more, he has since revealed in a Guardian interview that the family secret he reveals in the book is real – and his mother now isn’t speaking to him. Most shockingly of all, the gruesome murder, whose structural role as the grimly ironic conclusion to Carrère’s search for a subject to film in Kotelnich seems so clear, is also real: it involved a real woman and a real baby getting hacked to death with a real axe. What appears on first encounter to be a tricksy novel masquerading as memoir is in fact a bizarrely novelistic chain of real-life events masquerading as fiction.

A work that probes the intersection between life and art, A Russian Novel poses far more questions than it answers. Taken as a work of pure fiction it would be readable, engaging and at times surprisingly moving, if a little on the gimmicky side. Despite its non-fictional foundations there’s no doubt Carrère is being deliberately cute, and one of the novel’s central mechanisms is the way it bounces off our preconceptions, disrupting any genre-complacent approach we may care to take. However, the knowledge that Carrère is laying real cards on the table turns it into a perversely admirable work of bravery bordering on recklessness. It may not provide the narrative satisfaction of the sort of Tolstoyan epic its name evokes, but A Russian Novel is a genuinely inventive work with balls of steel.

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