Title: The Adversary
Author: Emmanuel Carrère
Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary was listed as on the
best non-fiction reads of the 21st century. Carrère’s work is part account, part thought
piece on the murderer, Jean-Claude Romand, who killed his wife, children, and
parents. The motive seems to be in part
that his years of lies – including his qualifications and job posting – were
about to be exposed.
Carrère’s
book is also an attempt to discover or to figure out what made Romand lie and
then kill his family as well as why no really seemed to pick up on the lies or
to challenge Romand sooner.
Reading
the book, one can easily agree with its placement on the list of great
non-fiction reads. Carrère’s prose does
easily grip the reader, and it is entirely possible and very likely that a
reader will finish the book in one setting.
But
there is also a sense of strangeness to the prose and the telling/examination
of the story.
In part
this is because, as Carrère himself admits, his focus, his concern, his Romand
not so much his victims – his parents Aime and Anne-Marie, his wife Florence,
and his two children Caroline and Antonie.
This makes the victims strangely absent or othered. The exception is Luc Ladmiral, a long time
friend of the Romands’. He had gone to
school with both Florence and Jean-Claude.
Jean-Claude was godfather to Ladmiral’s daughter.
The heavy use of Ladmiral makes the account a very male book. One cannot help but wonder if Florence was
quite as traditional in thinking as the men seem to think, and whether the
marriage was a all flower and roses, as the community in the voice of Ladmiral
seems to think. One wonders about why
Florence saw certainty things differently then the rest of her set – such as
the marriage of Corrine, a woman who becomes Jean-Claude’s mistress and also seems
to have a negative repetution because the men saw her as too attractive and too
tempting. There are also some strange
issues, like when Romand tries to kill his mistress. It is unclear if she reported it to the
police, and if she didn’t’ why - fear or
something else.
Second,
it is impossible knowing about the Flactif case and Samira Sedira’s brilliant novel
about the Flactif case for one not to make comparisons to the Romand case, even
though the Flactifs were murdered by a neighborhood. The murder of the Flactif
family occurred years after the Romand killings so there is no way that Carrère
could have referenced them. It is interesting
though because the same insular community is the same, but the reactions are different. The difference is that Romand was an insider,
he was one of them as it were. A long time
friend, white, of their education, even if some of that was lies. With the Flactifs, as Corrine and her husband
are outsiders. Would have Romand’s lies
and falsehood have been so overlooked and unquestioned if he had been outsider
is a question that Carrère does not answer or even seem to consider. Was Jean-Claude’s whiteness, his gender, and
his class part of the reason why the deception was able to last for so long?
More
importantly, does Carrère feel pity or even a degree of sympathy for the
murderer because of this background of gender, class, and traditional French
male? It seems that this is perhaps the
case, for Florence by and large is described in a traditional sense and Corrine
is described by and large as the stereotypical sex crazed and attractive
mistress. One wonders if there isn’t
some type of male morality tale in play as well. Carrère inserts himself in the story because
he sees the idea of a story but also it seems he sees himself. In fairness, he does report what another,
female reporter, says of his involvement with the story. And it is in passages like that one can even
see a greater work of introspection lurking.
FYI - you can find the list referred to in this review here
FYI #2 - Samira Sedira's book is People Like Them. An account of the Flactif murders can be found here. Curiositystream has a series, Crime Scene Investigators, which features the murders in a episode.
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