Who is popular today?

These pieces from the celebrated author of Limonov cover everything from true crime and reportage to celebrity interviews and sex columns
It is difficult to like Emanuel Carrère, yet impossible not to fall in love with him a bit too. Thanks to books such as Limonov (his account of a post-Soviet Russian hoodlum) and The Adversary (rather like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood transplanted to the French-Swiss border), Carrère is regarded as a superstar writer and documentary maker in France. 97,196 Words is a collection of his “higher journalism” – essays published in L’Obs (previously known as Le Nouvel Observateur), Paris Match and, above all, XX1, a sort of French hybrid of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The pieces cover everything from true crime and reportage to celebrity interviews and sex columns. Carrère’s author pic shows him looking roguish, brown and smoky as a nut and clever as paint. Think Janet Malcolm, but with more shagging.
Carrère is most Malcolm-like in his 1996 articles on “the Romand Case”, which became the basis for The Adversary. Dr Jean-Claude Romand, a handsome adviser to the World Health Organisation, killed his family and then tried to kill himself in 1993. In 1975 Romand, then a promising second year medical student at Lyon, flunked his exams. Instead of breaking the bad news to his parents, he simply carried on as if nothing had happened. In time he pretended to graduate, and subsequently announced he had landed a job at the WHO, even moving his family closer to Geneva. In reality, he was spending his days in his car. Only when friends started getting suspicious after 18 long years did his life start to unravel. Continue reading...