Carrere, Emmanuel: The Adversary

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Emmanuel Carrere's true crime story The Adversary begins with one of the most arresting first lines I have ever read: "On the Saturday morning of January 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." What follows is the nearly unbelievable story of Romand, who deceived his family and his closest friends for eighteen years, convincing them that he was a prominent doctor employed in Geneva by the World Health Organization. In fact, Romand had never finished medical school, and he spent his days reading newspapers in cafes or taking walks in the woods. He supported himself and his family on money he swindled from friends and relatives, trusting souls who, incredibly, rarely asked about the status of the considerable sums Romand had allegedly invested for them.

Romand's story might be just bizarrely amusing--a French variation of the life of deceit adopted by Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Catch Me If You Can, albeit with a less clever protagonist--were it not for what happened next. When Romand's deceit was likely to be uncovered--he had drained dry the well of his acquaintances' bank accounts--he murdered his wife and his parents, his five-year-old son and his daughter, and he tried, but only half-heartedly, to kill himself.

As the first sentence of Carrere's  book suggests, the author periodically interjects his own experiences and responses into his narrative. He is clearly concerned with separating himself from the small "club" of Jean-Claude's devotees, Christian prison visitors who have come to admire the murderer in his new role as repentant sinner, the anguished prisoner who has found God and, condemned to life, assumes his suffering as some sort of expiation for his crimes. Carrere is rightly appalled--at least to an extent--by these do-gooders, and he does manage to succeed, I think, in distancing himself from them. The author is decidedly not an apologist for Romand. Carrere's account of Romand's life and crimes, meanwhile, despite its horrific subject matter, is riveting.