Contemporary writers

Issues of identity

At the age of fifty, Emmanuel Carrère has proved once and for all that he is among the best French authors of our times. In Spring 2007, with Un Roman russe (pub. P.O.L, Paris) he offered up his first directly autobiographical work, and with it the keys to his whole oeuvre, one of the most unusual to have emerged in France in the last twenty years. In it he recounts two particularly distressing years of his life, or how family secrets and other unspoken matters had a major influence on his private life, and how this book finally released him from them.

In 2003, Emmanuel Carrère went off to a small town in Siberia to make a documentary about a Russian prisoner found in a hospital fifty years after the end of the Second World War, forgotten by everybody. This trip, which took him on the trail of his Russian roots on his mother’s side - the academician and academic Hélène Carrère d’Encausse - reawakened his interest in the story of his maternal grandfather, who disappeared mysteriously in the Second World War and was suspected of collaboration with the Nazi occupying forces.

As the months passed, Un Roman russe thus became the story of a man (Carrère himself) absent from his own life and from the woman he loves, caught up with the fundamental absence of his entire existence, that of his grandfather, a cancerous, disappointed and bitter man, brooding over his failures and his inability to carve out a destiny that matched up to his ambitions.

Through this experience turned into a book and the author’s confrontation with the depressive and self-destructive tendencies inherited from his grandfather, Emmanuel Carrère wards off the family bad luck. Delivered of this weighty secret, a source of shame and misfortune to several generations (a cousin ended up committing suicide while he was writing this book), he understands his own failures and finally frees himself of an obsession with horror.

All his previous novels were haunted by this "hole" in the family memory: we are thinking particularly of the writer’s highly successful L’Adversaire [The Adversary] (2000), twice adapted into film, telling the true story of a very well-known "missing person" and pathological liar, Jean-Claude Romand who escaped from reality by pretending to his family for twenty years that he was a doctor, whilst in fact living from petty theft and who ended up savagely killing his own family...

Emmanuel Carrère has always been fascinated by the sudden emergence of the strange, of madness, in daily life. In 1986, in his novel La Moustache [The Moustache] (which he himself directed for the cinema in 2005 with Vincent Lindon and Emmanuelle Devos), a man shaves off his moustache one day and realises that his family and friends don’t even notice. They simply say to him that he never had a moustache. Is he mad? Did these other people ever know him?

This paranoid subject of madness to the point of obsession is quite definitely the basis of Carrère’s literary world, and it is totally consistent with this that he should write in 1993, Je suis vivant et vous êtes mort [I am alive and you are dead], the biography of a science fiction author , Philip K. Dick, the writer on paranoia par excellence, with whom he was fascinated.

In the same vein, exploring the swing from the ordinary to the craziest and most alarming strangeness, Emmanuel Carrère focuses, in La Classe de neige [Class Trip] (Prix Femina 1995, which has been brought to the screen by Claude Miller), on the fears of a child obsessed by a sense of guilt, which we finally understand to concern his father.

Emmanuel Carrère is currently devoting himself to scriptwriting, especially for television. Since he finished his most recent book, he has been more at peace with life and he has had a daughter with the woman he loves.

Nelly Kaprièlian
Journalist on the arts weekly Les Inrockuptibles