ONFICTION
Emmanuel Carrère’s Disconcertingly Personal and Utterly Gripping Prose
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97,196 Words
Essays
By Emmanuel Carrère
Essays
By Emmanuel Carrère
“At dawn on Monday, Jan. 11, 1993, the fire brigade came to put out a fire in a house in Prévessin-Moëns, a small village in France’s Ain department, near the Swiss border. They found the partially charred bodies of a woman and two children, and a badly burned man, who was taken to the hospital in a critical state.”
So begins the first account by Emmanuel Carrère (now reprinted in “97,196 Words,” his new collection of essays) of the horrifying case of Dr. Jean-Claude Romand that galvanized France: No one had heard of anything like it; no one could understand it. Yet the facts were incontestable, the verdict and sentence assured: guilty, and life imprisonment, the death penalty being a thing of the past in France. (In fact, he was released from prison just this past spring, after serving 26 years.)
The trial lasted eight days as everyone tried to absorb the fact that Romand, a happily married father of two and a well-known researcher (he worked for the World Health Organization, which was based across the border in Geneva), had one day cracked open his sleeping wife’s head with a rolling pin, shot and killed their two children, and then driven 40 miles to his parents’ home and murdered them as well. He even killed the family dog, whom he loved and whose picture he carried in his wallet. Then he went to Paris to see his mistress, or ex-mistress, or not exactly mistress, intending to kill her as well, but she felt something was wrong and managed to get rid of him. Then he went back home, waited with the bodies of his family for almost a day, swallowed some barbiturates and set the house on fire.
He didn’t die, though; he survived, with only a fragmented memory of what he had done. At the trial, experts analyzed and propounded, and he himself spoke lucidly and in apparent control. Yet Carrère, on hand to cover the proceedings for Le Nouvel Observateur, remarks that those in the courtroom “have had ample time to wonder, from the height of our clinical ignorance and flying in the face of four psychiatric experts, if he really belonged in a criminal court, and if what you felt on your nape wasn’t the cold wind of psychosis.” He ends his two-part article this way: “Behind his glass enclosure, Romand listens expressionless. No one knows what he’s thinking, not even him.”
What emerges is a history so unlikely, so bizarre, that it’s hard to credit it. Jean-Claude Romand wasn’t a doctor, nor had he ever worked for the W.H.O. At some point in medical school he did poorly on an exam, kept this news from his family and future wife, and never chose to take the test again. For 12 years in a row he enrolled for the second year and never attended a class. No one noticed. Year after year he declared no income, and the French equivalent of the I.R.S. never noticed. Every weekday morning he drove “to work,” dropped the kids off at their school and came back in time for dinner, except when, as an important scientist, he was away traveling for the W.H.O. When the whole edifice collapsed (he was just shy of 39), it turned out that in all the time he had been perpetrating this fraud, only a single friend had begun to wonder what exactly his job consisted of, but felt ashamed of doubting him and let it go.
What had he been doing during those thousands of days of not going to work? What had he and his family lived on? Apparently, he would drive all over the region, reading in his car all the latest medical studies and absorbing all the latest research. When he was talking with his friends, most of whom were doctors, pharmacists and other professionals, he was utterly convincing. As Carrère puts it, “He spent exactly as much energy pretending to be that person as it would have taken to really be him.”
As for money, his family and friends (his mistress among them) were happy to have this successful and worldly scientist invest their money — until, inevitably, disclosure loomed when there was no money left to return to them. At which point Romand concluded that when his embezzlement was exposed, his wife and his parents would not be able to survive the knowledge of what he had done. Which meant that he had to kill them in order to spare them that knowledge.
Carrère couldn’t get Romand out of his mind, concluding that this was a case — a life — on which he could base the “nonfiction novel” he had been hoping to write ever since encountering Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” a book he revered. When the trial was over, he wrote to Romand in prison explaining what he wanted to do. When he received no answer, he went on to other things, partly relieved. Two years later he finally heard from Romand, who had read a novel Carrère had recently published called “Class Trip,” which reminded him of his childhood traumas. Now he was ready to meet with Carrère, and they began the long and painful process of trying to understand each other.
But when Carrère sat down to write, he found he couldn’t: Trying to tell the story from the outside, as a work of reportage, proved to be impossible. No matter how much investigating he did, no matter how much he studied the case file — “It’s a stack of boxes twice my height, and even as I write, they’re still in my closet, ready to be returned to Romand when he gets out of prison” — he couldn’t find a way into his book, spending, he says, “something like five years in this quagmire of paper, not knowing how to get started.” More time passed, until one day, having decided to give up the project, he found himself typing “On the Saturday morning of Jan. 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He was 5 years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal.”
By breaking with Capote’s model — by “saying yes to the first person,” as Carrère puts it — he had found his way. When his book, “The Adversary,” was published in 2000, not everybody liked it, neither in France, where Carrère was already well known for his novels and screenplays, nor abroad, where he was largely unknown. But the book became a tremendous success, signaling a new approach to the writing of nonfiction: deeply personal, deeply empathetic, disconcertingly self-revelatory. Carrère spared no one, least of all himself. Each of his books became not only a superb account of its subject but a painful report of the author’s struggle to find a way to write it. His reputation grew with every book, until in an excellent profile of him published in The New York Times Magazine in 2017, Wyatt Mason could state with authority: “If Michel Houellebecq is routinely advanced as France’s greatest living writer of fiction, Carrère, whose prose is no less remarkable for its purity and whose vision is no less broad, is widely understood as France’s greatest writer of nonfiction.”
That is why the publication of “97,196 Words” is of such consequence. Here, in roughly the order of their original publication, are 20 essays (totaling 97,196 words) that reveal both the depth and the breadth of his achievement. Not that all of them are masterpieces. Carrère has done what so many self-anthologists do (I plead guilty to the same misdemeanor): He’s indulged himself by rescuing from obscurity certain stories that did not really demand rescue. (An embarrassing failed interview with Catherine Deneuve; an aborted proposal for a screenplay about a boy who can, at will, become invisible; a tribute to H. P. Lovecraft; a sardonic take on the World Economic Forum in Davos — all of these provide clues to untangling his psyche, but perhaps are more important to the history of his psychoanalysis than to the history of his art.) The abundant majority of the pieces in this book, however, are riveting, not least those that he later developed into full-scale books. In such cases, it’s clearly not a matter of recycling old material but of responding to an urgent need in him to know more, understand more, feel more. And we are gripped by the same pressure: No matter how often he returns to his story, we are carried along with him.
One of his recurring subjects first appeared in the magazine Télérama in 2001. Carrère is in Nyiregyhaza, a small town in northeastern Hungary, to film the return to his birthplace of an old man named Andras Toma who has recently become renowned as the last World War II prisoner of war to be repatriated — 56 years after he was captured by the Russians and washed up in a small psychiatric hospital in a consummately dreary city a long way northwest of Moscow. (“It’s a gray, muddy backwater,” Carrère tells us, “where for the past 10 years not a single house has had hot water.”) The place is called Kotelnich, and no one has ever heard of it or wants to hear about it; it just happens to be where Toma was taken off a train heading for Siberia when he suffered a major breakdown. He wasn’t in Kotelnich as a criminal or political prisoner, he was just there. Why wasn’t he sent on to the gulag or home to Hungary? Because no one could communicate with him: He spoke no Russian and no one in Kotelnich spoke Hungarian. He was 22, and was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.
In 10 pages, Carrère describes Toma’s homecoming to the place where he was born — the reunion of this bewildered old man with his brother, his sister, a woman he had once kissed and who had never forgotten him. He can barely speak — he’s hardly spoken with anyone for half a century.
Carrère has no choice. He goes to Kotelnich in his need to know what happened to Andras Toma there. And he succeeds in finding out. No one is alive who remembers Toma when he arrived, but Carrère is allowed to study the file that the psychiatrists kept of their 50-odd years of biweekly observations:
“Jan. 15, 1947: The patient speaks neither Russian nor German. He is passive during examinations, he tries to explain something in Hungarian.
“Oct. 15, 1948: The patient has a sex drive. He laughs on his bed. He does not obey hospital rules. He flirts with Nurse Guilichina. Patient Boltus is jealous. He hit Toma.
“Sept. 30, 1954: The patient is idiotic and negative. He only speaks Hungarian.”
And on and on. Nowhere in the files is there any mention of medication or therapy. Eventually Toma grows docile and is given tasks to perform: working in the fields; walking into town with someone who speaks Russian to perform errands. Meals are gruel, which the nurses cart around in large enamel pails. Mozart comes over the radio. No doubt, Carrère says, the hospital would like to send the patients back home, “but they don’t have a home, so they stay. They’re not really cared for, they’re hardly spoken to, but they’re kept. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing either.” (There’s the true Carrère voice.)
In 1996 something serious goes wrong with one of Toma’s legs, and it’s amputated — there’s no one to give or withhold permission. And then, three and a half years later, someone from the ministry of health visits the hospital, somehow learns Toma’s story, is overheard by a journalist who now has something to report: “The last prisoner of World War II is in our midst.” The story is picked up everywhere, and the Hungarian government organizes his repatriation. “Without understanding a thing about what was happening to him, Andras Toma was back in Hungary.”
Carrère’s article for Télérama was written to accompany a documentary report that appeared on television. But he was not finished with Kotelnich — or, rather, Kotelnich was not finished with him. He’s drawn back there to film the town itself, although it’s a miserable place and he has no idea what he hopes to film there. And something happens: A young woman he had been friendly with on his previous trip is butchered, along with her baby. A Dostoyevskian crime in a Gogolesque landscape. He has his film, but “the next four years I spent first unable to write, then, finally, writing ‘My Life as a Russian Novel.’ This book is at once the novelization of my documentary, a public psychoanalysis and the last stage in this cycle that took shape in an unpremeditated way, in groping loyalty to life’s twists and turns and the demands of the unconscious.”
It is Carrère’s most intense and painful novel, and it seems obvious why that is. It’s about Kotelnich, yes, but also about him and Russia, and more important, him and his mother.
And what a mother! Hélène Carrère d’Encausse is generally considered to be France’s greatest Russia expert, and for 20 years she has been the “perpetual secretary” of the Académie Française. Her family was Georgian aristocracy (the current president of Georgia is a cousin). Her father was a Russian official who was accused, in the days after the war, of having collaborated with the Germans and who subsequently disappeared — presumably executed. Mother and son are deeply connected yet frequently confrontational, and she is up in arms at the idea that in Emmanuel’s increasing passion for Russia and things Russian he will write about her Russian father’s disgrace. In “My Life as a Russian Novel” he defies her, with predictable results. In an enlightening interview in The Paris Review, he reports that after the universal success of a later book, “Lives Other Than My Own,” “she said very sweetly, I’m pleased because I was under the impression that I must have been a monstrous mother to have created such a monstrous son.”
Carrère’s interest in Russia stretches from a dogged, awkward struggle to learn Russian to an essay and, eventually, a novel called “Limonov,” about a remarkable character — Eduard Limonov, a cult figure whose activities ranged from hustling and butlering in New York to writing novels and nonfiction that were highly successful in France, where he lived for a number of years; to establishing himself as a pro-Serbian player during the Balkan wars; to becoming a potent political force in Russia with his own anti-Putin party (and where he spent a good deal of time in prison). In “Limonov,” Carrère once again reminds us of Dostoyevsky, his most constant cultural referent when in his Russian mode. (When he’s being French, his inevitable touchstone is Montaigne.)
Carrère is masterly both at singling out the telling detail and of grasping and conveying his subject as a whole. His take on the city of Calais in its role as unwilling receptionist to the 8,000 or so migrants who clustered there at the entrance to the Chunnel — on the camps set up to deal with them, the impassioned reactions to them by local citizens, and the migrants’ abrupt, ruthless dispersal by the state — is as balanced as it is dismaying. And the final section of the book, written for The Guardian in 2017, is an irresistible close-up of France’s new president: “Orbiting Jupiter: My Week With Emmanuel Macron,” that other imposing Emmanuel. This is political reportage at its most lively and acute. (And, yes, Mme. Macron is just as terrific a person as we’ve sensed she was.)
We get a long article about Philip K. Dick, that astounding — and, to me, I’m somewhat discomfited to admit, often puerile — hero of the world of science fiction. (Carrère went on to write a full-scale biography of him.) But Carrère was young when he discovered Dick — the right age to discover him — and let’s note that the esteemed Library of America has devoted three fat volumes to his work.
We get constant news of Carrère’s romantic and sexual experiences — he’s in love, he’s out of love; this woman leaves him, this one is left by him. Something is clearly out of kilter, an impression confirmed by the trouble he finds himself in when he’s commissioned by Le Monde, France’s most distinguished newspaper, to write an extended piece for a summer weekend issue, the subject up to him. His choice is to write a pornographic story timed to be read by his girlfriend on the train she’ll be taking to join him on the Île de Ré. It was, he tells us, “explicitly addressed to her and took the form of instructions: You’re in the train going from Paris to La Rochelle. It’s July 20, 2002, 4:15 p.m. You read these lines, I tell you to do this, I tell you to do that — and this and that involved indulging in sexual fantasies and then going to masturbate in the toilet.” All this to be read not only by his girlfriend but by the several hundred thousand people who read Le Monde, including many who will be on the same train. “Everything depended on surprise, and I was terrifically amused — and aroused — by the idea of concocting this thing that was simultaneously an erotic game, a joyful hijacking of the most respectable French newspaper and a literary performance that was to my mind unprecedented.”
He’s in a frenzy of excitement and anxiety about everything going without a hitch. But nothing goes right, and the result of this “prank,” needless to say, was disaster: “I broke up with my girlfriend, what should have been funny and lighthearted turned out to be horribly sad.” And yet he includes this wretched episode in “My Life as a Russian Novel.” What are we to think? The easiest thing is to put it down to midlife crisis, but that, of course, minimizes the pain he was responsible for. “When I think about it now,” he told The Paris Review in 2013, “I am completely appalled. The strange part is that I actually thought it was a charming, innocent gesture that she would take as a declaration of love, a marvelous gift. Le Monde was submerged with hate mail, readers asking for their subscriptions to be canceled. It was a terrible scandal.”
We get “Death in Sri Lanka,” Carrère’s first attempt, early in 2005, to deal with the overwhelming devastation caused by the tsunami that killed close to a quarter of a million people. Through pure luck, while he, his girlfriend, Hélène, and one each of their children were vacationing at a hotel where so many people died, they had on a whim decided not to go down to the water that morning. Later on, through an act of authorial genius, he manages to combine that awful experience with another awful experience — the death by brain cancer of Hélène’s beloved sister, 33 years old, an esteemed judge and the mother of three young girls. This is the book called “Lives Other Than My Own,” a work of great beauty — the book that secured Carrère’s position within the French literary world and with the public, and the one I would recommend to anyone who wants to start exploring his work. But almost all his books are worth reading. And not only owing to the almost uniform fascination of his subjects. For me, what is most compelling about his work is the quality of his mind, of his thinking. Of the scourging pressure of his need to understand.
In “97,196 Words,” we also get a preview of his latest and longest book, “The Kingdom,” a novel based on the life of St. Luke, the least known of the writers of the four Gospels. It is also an account of Carrère’s own religious history. At a moment of crisis and despair, he suddenly abandoned his lifelong casual attitude to religion and plunged into several years of intense devotion — praying, worshiping, studying the Gospels. It was many years later that he decided to imagine what the lives of these chroniclers were like. “I wanted to know who one of these authors was. … I tried to picture who this Luke was, what he thought, what he believed, and to reconstruct the physical and mental context in which his life took place. Since what we call the Gospel According to Luke is a portrait of Jesus, I found myself making a portrait of the portraitist.” And then, Carrère being Carrère, we get to the heart of the matter. “No doubt my Luke bears no likeness to the real Luke; no one knows what the real Luke was like. But at least it resembles me, and that’s a start.”
So let’s wind up, appropriately, with “me.” The most unexpected (by me) piece in this collection is an article about Janet Malcolm’s famous “The Journalist and the Murderer,” which ran in 1989 in The New Yorker and was published the next year, as a book, by Knopf.
To begin with, Malcolm has been one of my closest friends for something like 40 years. And then it was I who published her book at Knopf. (I don’t think you can get more Me than that.) However, since I wasn’t a journalist — and would have made a poor one — I was able to be relatively disinterested as I followed the torrent of both criticism and vindication that was prompted by Malcolm’s provocative opening lines: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” Which was not, it turned out, the way the majority of America’s journalists liked to think of themselves.
Malcolm’s immediate subject was in itself gripping. The writer Joe McGinniss had entered into an arrangement with the “murderer,” Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, that led MacDonald to presume that McGinniss would present his case favorably. But when McGinniss’s book, “Fatal Vision,” appeared, he loudly proclaimed his belief that MacDonald was guilty of having murdered his wife and two young children. Had McGinniss “betrayed” his subject?
Carrère could not be more complimentary about Malcolm’s book, “which is not an essay but a narrative of rare vivacity: a model of literary reporting that should be studied in journalism schools as well as creative-writing workshops, and that amply deserves its classification among the 100 best works of nonfiction.” Yet “I would like to add that something about this brilliant, stimulating work troubles me … at the risk of transforming this review into [a] plea on my own behalf, I would like to say that’s not always how things are. And I’m not talking through my hat: For the past 15 years I’ve been writing nonfiction books that describe real events and real people, well known or not, close friends or distant acquaintances. Some of them I’ve hurt, yes, but I maintain that I did not dupe any of them.” In other words, Me.
Yet in his summing up he both taketh away and giveth, striving as he always does to arrive at a true understanding, even at his own expense: “Janet Malcolm puts all her talent into demonstrating that the relationship between an author of nonfiction and her subject is by nature dishonest, that’s just the way things are, and it can’t be changed. But I think it can: I think that, yes, there is a border, but that this border doesn’t run, as some would like to think, between the journalist — hurried, superficial, unscrupulous — and the writer — noble, profound, beset by moral qualms — but between authors who believe they’re above the story they’re telling and those who accept the uncomfortable idea that they are also bound up in it. An example of the first school: the pitiful and spineless Joe McGinniss. An example of the second: Janet Malcolm herself, who, all the while declaring such honesty impossible, demonstrates it herself from the beginning to the end of her book.”
Maybe it takes one to know one.
Robert Gottlieb’s most recent books are “Avid Reader,” a memoir, and “Near-Death Experiences … and Others,” a collection of essays.
97,196 WORDS
Essays
By Emmanuel Carrère
Translated by John Lambert
294 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
Essays
By Emmanuel Carrère
Translated by John Lambert
294 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
A version of this article appears in print on , Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Acts of Empathy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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