One of the most persistent themes in the writings of Emmanuel Carrère is the elusive strangeness that lies never too far below the surface of everyday life. One of the best examples of this is L’Adversaire (published in English as The Adversary in 2001), which tells the true story of Jean-Claude Romand, an outwardly respectable doctor, living with his family near the Swiss border and working at the World Health Organisation. His wife and two children appeared to have died in a house fire, which Romand survived – although he had apparently tried to kill himself with an overdose of Nembutal.
The police, however, discovered that the family had been shot and were all but dead before the fire; Romand’s two parents had also been shot dead, and that same afternoon Romand had tried to strangle his mistress, who reported him to the police. It then emerged that Romand did not work at the World Health Organisation, nor did he have any medical qualifications. His middle-class lifestyle was funded by dodgy investments and stealing from a retirement fund. He claimed he had cancer to attract sympathy and attention from friends and family. But all of Romand’s life was a lie. As the story unravelled in the courts in France through the mid-1990s, Romand suddenly found his true vocation: he became famous, and began to revel in the attention.
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