EMMANUEL CARRÉRE — THE ADVERSARY

Image: Jean-Claude Romand, the subject of the book

True crime from someone whose fiction I admire quite a lot (see Class Trip). What we have is a baffling atrocity. Deals with the question of why a sane man would murder his entire family. Big question. 

One role of the author in society is to try and figure out things that don’t make sense. Writing as a practice is well-suited to this aim, and Mr. Carrère is even more well-suited; his empathetic gifts are rare. 

It’s hard to try to be empathetic. You either are or you aren’t. Every sentence here suggests to me that Mr. Carrère is, the way Goethe and Dostoevsky were. But those guys never wrote true crime.