Emmanuel Carrère

Fire and water take three planets each here, with two apiece in earth and air. Nothing is missing and nothing dominates. Carrère is a French writer who blends reportage with memoir, which is a method that requires being accurate about other people and honest about yourself in the same paragraph, and most writers manage only one of those.

The Sun sits at seventeen degrees of Sagittarius with Saturn a third of a degree away, identity fused directly to the planet of limit and duty. Sagittarius goes out and tells the story; Saturn insists on what it actually cost. That conjunction is the whole method in one aspect, and it is the reason the books are neither comfortable journalism nor comfortable confession. The Moon answers from Cancer, which keeps everything.

Venus stands at an awkward angle to Pluto one hundredth of a degree from exact, which is as tight as the arithmetic puts a pair: what he values permanently just out of true with concentrated force. Venus also sits at a hard angle to that same Saturn at half a degree. Uranus and Pluto were the two retrograde planets, and nothing in the chart forms a named pattern to hold any of it. In a writer who puts himself beside his subjects, taste permanently out of true with force is the discomfort the books are made from.

Jupiter stood again on its Libra birth degree on 17 September 2017, at fifty nine, ten months after Saturn closed its own lap. Libra asks what was balanced rather than what was gained, which for a writer whose entire problem is the balance between two people's versions of the same events is the measure the work already uses on itself. Five circuits precede it, and a Sun welded to Saturn means every one of them was counted rather than simply enjoyed. For a writer who puts himself in the frame alongside his subjects, a Cancer Moon that keeps everything is the archive the books are drawn from.