97,196 Words: Essays

by Emmanuel Carrère, John Lambert (Translation)

A selection of the best short work by France's greatest living nonfiction writer

Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented nonfiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach: Theology, historiography, reportage, and memoir--among many others--are fused under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, and intellect that has made Carrère one of our most distinctive and important literary voices today.

97,196 Words introduces Carrère's shorter work to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary texts written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère's creative life, the book shows a remarkable mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère's own.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, France, French Literature, Literature, Unfinished, Journalism

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2019

About the author

Emmanuel Carrère is a French author, screenwriter, and director. He is the son of Louis Carrère d'Encausse and French historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse.

Carrère studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (better known as Sciences Po). Much of his writing, both fiction and nonfiction, centers around the primary themes of the interrogation of identity, the development of illusion, and the direction of reality. Several of his books have been made into films; in 2005, he personally directed the film adaptation of his novel La Moustache. He was the president of the jury of the book Inter 2003.

(Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine introduction to Carrere, though devotees (and I am one) may be a bit disappointed in how much of this collection appears in his long-form works - Adversary, Limonov, the Philip K Dick Book, My Life as a Russian Novel, Lives Other Than My Own, and the extraordinary The Kingdom are all excerpted here, resulting in strange deja vu. But what was a 3 star experience for may likely won't be for you - at his best, there is no non-fiction writer like Carrere, who has a keen wit, a need to confess, and a libertine streak. The essays that were new to me - especially an Italian dating column from the 90's and a profile of Luke Reindhart - were a blast. Out this autumn.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s trite, it’s terrible. It’s even more terrible when it’s not things but a single thing, and that single thing abandons you.

The rating was based on a simple premise, whenever I read a collection or anthology there are always duds, but here I truly loved every piece. Crucial to that joy, was likely the freshness, the odd voice which I didn't anticipate. My wife had read the author years ago, his novella The Class trip. I don't believe I had ever read a line of his before this. I had acquired The Kingdom last summer but it was the back matter on this edition which led me to buy it last Sunday when visiting the indie bookstore in the Louisville. There's something conversational, yet slightly trippy and certainly well-read, if not erudite, in these musings. It must be admitted that I have always regarded true crime as the literary refuge of perverts, but the three short pieces which began this collection nearly mesmerized in their frank descriptions and deadpan philosophy.

Late July always witnesses a morose turn, as I ponder my impending birthday and all that such involves. It isn't pretty. Imagine my surprise when this previously unknown French weirdo explores his sense of being with a parallel concern and apprehension. The article on Eduard Limonov prompted me to buy the author's full length treatment of the subject and indeed I am looking forward to that. I did broach The Kingdom last night but can't stomach a creative nonfiction nor any other approach to Catholicism and The Apostles. This appears to be a more than worthy introduction to a singular author.

[emily]

Maybe this is just one of those ‘you got to read one bad book at the start of the year (to quickly get it out of the way), so better books can come by faster’? I almost ‘hate’ myself for not reading Vladimir Sorokin instead. Sorokin blows my fucking mind (not sure in a good way or not, but in a way that interests me, and most importantly — doesn’t feel like I’ve wasted my time). EC bores me (mostly), to put simply/plainly. Could’ve and should’ve (even) read Édouard Louis’ work in French — or even, translated spectacularly into English by Tash Aw. And speaking of Tash Aw, I should actually read his new one, ‘The South’ (available in shops, Feb 2025).

I, being silly, have unfortunately spent my time on the wrong writer/book (EC/EC’s), confessedly. There is literally a massive list of ‘men’ I could’ve/should’ve read instead of EC. To name a few — Hanif Abdurraqib, Marlon James, Percival Everett, James Baldwin, Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Jeff VanderMeer, and Anton Hur’s translations as well (and even those Werner Herzog books that I’ve yet to read)? Adrian Tchaikovsky? Chen Qiu Fan? And/but that aside, I was also very much feeling like reading Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing (and in hindsight, I definitely should’ve done that). Alas, I am ‘silly’ to have given EC a chance.

It makes me wonder — if I just rip the middle part out, would I be able to appreciate the text then? The way EC writes about women (and how he is so ‘specific’ about what is ‘male’ and what is ‘female’ — like what is this incessant need for this distinction that is obviously only limited to his own views? To quickly summarise — he writes in a gross self-pleasuring, self-aggrandising way — to describe how much (and how sure) he ‘knows’ women, and how it’s women’s fault for not desiring him. More or less that. And on top of that, he constantly claims that his ‘speculation’ is a ‘fact’/ ‘truth’ (and although a ‘subjective’ view, I wrote in one of the pages (quite early on) ‘even without knowing how he looks like, I am already certain as fuck that I find him unattractive, almost instantaneously’. If you think Murakami’s ‘fiction’ depicting women is unpalatable, (a white, Frenchman) EC’s ‘non-fiction’ depicting women is just worlds worse (one can’t help but laugh, disappointing — at oneself for giving the writing the attention and time). Maybe I should have started with his ‘fiction’. Unfortunately, I do find his ‘style’ of writing (not the content/substance) quite pleasant — which is probably a major reason why I was able to read this from cover to cover. But maybe the ‘truth’ is that I was drawn towards John Lambert’s translations (at least in terms of ‘tone’ and structure)?

Not to say this ‘makes it better’ or makes me feel less ‘silly’ about reading/having read EC, but I got a copy of this with the intention of giving it to a friend as a gift. If it’s any consolation (to myself mostly), fortunately I gave it a quick read first, otherwise how ‘shit’ (and inconsiderate, unthoughtful) of a gift would this be/have been? To be fair, the less personal writings are somewhat tolerable. It’s the ‘personal’ ones that are really not worth anyone’s time. It’s all quite repetitive as well, so that doesn’t do anyone any ‘good’ at all. I dare not call EC’s writing ‘overrated’ — that itself is far too inaccurate, and a grand understatement.

[SK · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm the Carrère fan in the household, but, to my delight, it was my husband who bought this one, shortly after reading the Guardian piece about the Dice Man. It was all we talked about for roughly a week, opting, even, to throw the die ourselves on one occasion (with low stakes and mostly in jest, though I was still horrified. There's something very dark about Luke Rhinehart and his following.)

Like other reviewers have mentioned, there is some familiar territory here for those who have already read Carrère but in my case, I didn't mind revisiting Romand, the gospel writer Luke, and Sri Lanka, and I thoroughly enjoyed what was new to me: "The Lost Hungarian," "The Life of Julie," and "Letter to a Woman of Calais" being among my favorites. And, of course, "In Search of the Dice Man."

For me, the best thing to come out of reading this collection is that it helped clarify exactly what it is that I find so beguiling and addictive about Carrère's writing.

"I am not afraid of clichés," he writes in "Capote, Romand, and Me," and that's something right there⁠—the ironic fact of his originality stemming from his embrace of the familiar. ⁠I dislike writing that is straining too hard to be original; Carrère's a natural, and I love him for it.

But even more, I appreciate his approach to journalism, encapsulated powerfully and succinctly in "The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm." Here he draws a distinction between journalists who "believe they're above the story they're telling and those who accept the idea that they are also bound up in it" (207). Capote and Carrère are in the same camp. They might admit to hurting their subjects but they never dupe their readers. People often say that Carrère blends genres; I think it's his commitment to the truth that results in usual books that resist categorization.

A good note on which to end the year. Though I suppose it's not technically my book, I still stamped my name on it with my embosser. First come, first served!

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The prize goes to the Barclays banking group for its food-speculation activities: in the second quarter of 2010 alone, it put 44 million people below the poverty line by artificially raising food prices.”

There were quite a few memorable highlights in here, the story of a Hungarian man shipped off to a Siberian mental institutions for decades in “The Lost Hungarian”. Then there’s Carrere’s dark experience of being in Sri Lanka during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. Though one of the funniest and most entertaining has to be “Nine Columns For An Italian Magazine” which throws up all sorts of fun and provocative ideas on sex and dating.

His visit to Luke “The Dice Man” Rhineheart, where as well as meeting the man himself, he later visits a dedicated Dice Man acolyte in Madrid with some colourful results. Elsewhere he also covers the likes of Davos, Philip K Dick, Eduard Limonov and Emmanuel Macron.

Carrere has a really likeable style and this collection put me in mind of many other fine essayists, the likes of Jon Ronson, Geoff Dyer and A.A. Gill. Good, solid essays, the kind where you turn the page and you have no idea where they are going to take you next. That thrilling and rewarding quality which appears effortless but is actually a real skill, essays which teach you, entertain you and take you to places you had no idea existed, essays that make you feel like you just invested in something really worthwhile and feel just a bit better or more intrigued about the world around you.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I do think Carrere's tendency to grapple deeply with the subjectivity of writing/reporting works better in his longer-form pieces (two or three or more of which grew out of pieces collected here), there are some memorable among these, including a dirty relationship column, a vivid portrait of Macron and a visit with the author of The Dice Man in Upstate New York. I guess the thing with a subjectivity--or at least with Carrere's subjectivity--is that it is not fleeting, but follows you around whether you want it to or not.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mere journalist, but a highly controlled one who knows his sweet spot—the mutability and poignancy of selfhood—and lingers therein to good effect.

[Hal Brodsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up from our excellent public library after reading an interview of Carrie're in The New Yorker.

Carrie're is certainly an excellent New Journalist of the Joan Didion school. This book is a collection of mostly published magazine articles some of which are clearly botched assignments which he rescues by telling first person stories about his failure.
A few are boring and one, about a migrant camp in Calais is irrelevant (the camp is long gone per my Google search), but interesting in that many of the townspeople Carrie're interviewed blamed the migrants for their own unrelated problems (the town's main industry, lace making, was offshored to India costing tens of thousands of jobs and the Chunnel damaged the shipping and tourism industry), so they vote for the extreme Nationalist Party, get drunk, do drugs, and want to kill all non-white French people. Sound familiar? Carrie're refers to them as "rednecks". Who knew rednecks were international!

I did watch a Davud Lynch type movie Carrie're wrote and co-produced called "The Mustache", and now I will have to read some of his longer works.

[Ugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not really essays: more reportage and rumination. So if you come expecting essays, you may be disappointed. If you're a journalist or a fan of journalism, and want to read not only great examples of the form but also some fourth-wall breaking on it, then you'll probably love this.

Carrere explains that he thinks it isn't possible to keep the journalist out of the journalism, and so he doesn't try. A journalist myself, I disagree for most situations, but at least Carrere does it in a way that isn't overly grating - in fact it's often interesting in its own right, although generally still a slight distraction from the topic at hand.

Anyway, his writing here is always lively and engaging, and his subjects unfailingly interesting - to me, anyway, although perhaps some might find the pieces on Philip K Dick and the author of The Dice Man slightly redolent of adolescent boyhood.

Standouts for me were pieces on Eduard Limonov and Emmanuel Macron. Is the latter absolute mastery of form? If not, it's surely only a whisker away.

[William Schram · Rating 4 out of 5]

"96,196 Words: Essays" is a charming collection of essays from a man I don't know. Emmanuel Carrere is an accomplished writer from France. The articles cover topics as wide-ranging as Philip K Dick and true crime. One example of a great piece is The Romand Case. How do you pretend to be a doctor for 18 years and have no one suspect anything? It boggles my mind that someone can pull that off. Furthermore, rather than admit his whole life was a lie, he went on a killing spree.

Carrere's writing draws you in and doesn't let up. I am glad I picked it up from the library.

[Khadija · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best collection of essays I’ve ever come across

[Roland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing

An absolutely stunning book of essays about the famous and infamous... A true dissection of human nature .. can’t recommend it enough

[Bergþór Másson · Rating 4 out of 5]

solid safn, margt endurtekið úr fyrri verkum en lítið mál að hoppa yfir það - prófíll á Macron og persónulega stöffið stendur upp úr

[Abhishek Kona · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some brilliant pieces, some meh. The one about the last soldier of WW2 and a doctor living a fake life were the best.

Good writer, too much book.

[Jade Capiñanes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because I wanted to see for myself the writings of Carrère, who according to “The New York Times” “reinvented nonfiction.” And I’m glad I did. The strongest pieces in this collection are the reportage pieces. There’s a piece about Jean-Claude Romand, a guy who faked his being a doctor for years without anyone finding out about it, who killed his own family when he was about to be found out. There’s also an emotional piece about a Hungarian prisoner of war who finally goes home after decades of staying in a psychiatric institution in Russia. Also: a piece about a photographer who documented the lives of people with AIDS. But probably my favorite: “In Search of the Dice Man,” which is about the cult novel “The Dice Man” and its reclusive author. I just think it’s one of the top 5 best creative nonfiction pieces I’ve read ever. All in all what’s unique about Carrère’s nonfiction pieces is that between the lines they’re almost always questioning their status and purpose as nonfiction.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love the authorial voice: friendly, confiding, half thinking out loud. best pieces are on philip k. dick, macron, the dice man. i did not know he wrote so much on sex -- here's a long excerpt from the eighth of the pieces he wrote for an italian magazine:

I thought back to my previous columns and said to myself that for someone who’d been hired on the basis of his reputation as an amiable pornographer, I’d been remarkably chaste up to now. Flirts with no tomorrow, lame blind dates, ruminations about the fear of commitment; lucky that in the meantime I’d fallen in love or, to be more precise, fallen back in love with the woman I left six months ago. She loves not only to make love but also to talk about it, two things that conventional wisdom deems contradictory (the more you talk about it, the less you do it), but on this point as on many others I distrust conventional wisdom. On the contrary, I believe that sex and talking go exceedingly well together. I like it when a woman tells me about her sex life, the ways she desired the men she desired, what she did to them, what they did to her, what their cocks were like. You can say an element of homosexuality is in all of that, I won’t take offense: I agree completely. As the time for writing this article was approaching, I consulted my lover: a thousand words, give or take a few, with a little sex thrown in. Any ideas? She had several, enough to fill a couple of columns. Here’s one:
“I was at a disco once, with some friends. There were a lot of people, it was dark, the place was packed. I’d been dancing for a long time and had come back to talk with a friend at the bar—well, talk: I mean form words with my mouth that the music and noise prevented her from hearing—and laugh with her because we couldn’t understand a thing. I’d drunk a bit, I was wearing a skirt and standing sideways at the bar, other bodies pressed up against mine but it didn’t last long, just in passing. Then something that must have been a hand settled on my butt and stayed there. I moved, shifted my weight a little, but the hand kept up its pressure. I analyzed the situation: a guy’s got his hand on my ass. Even without any whole-hog feminism it’s a gesture you associate with a lousy come-on, one that merits a rebuff or even a slap in the face. Normally you send a guy who puts his hand on your ass packing without much further ado. But this hand had—how to put it?—something friendly about it. It was firm but not clumsy, insistent but not indiscreet. It was warm; in fact I was happy it stayed put and wasn’t discouraged by my faked twitches of annoyance. I was also happy not to know who it belonged to. I continued to talk, and the hand that I had done nothing to discourage felt encouraged, the fingers slipped under my skirt from the waist, first the fingers, then the whole palm. Sure, everyone was squeezed together, still I wondered if anyone could see what was going on: a hand had slipped inside my skirt and now was rubbing against my panties. I moved to ease its way, and in any case from where it was the hand couldn’t fail to grasp that I was excited. It started caressing me—very well—and the whole time I kept talking to my friend, wondering if you could see on my face that an unknown hand was making me come. The funniest thing is that since she was standing in front of me, she must have seen the man or woman behind me who was fingering me so well.”

[Mbogo J · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the downsides of reading a lot is that nothing surprises you anymore. You could be reading the grimmest climate projections and rather than imagining a Mad Max future and getting alarmed you find yourself wondering whether the model used was really robust enough. The bar for what is an impressive read is set very high, seldom crossed but when it does, the experience is unmatched. It is a journey into uncharted waters with the next turn of the page opening up new islands never laid eyes upon until now... This book cleared the bar.

Carrere deserves the title of a writer. A true representative of practitioners of this craft. The only other writer to have attained this standard was Alexander Chee. An unmatched span of subjects, changing narrators and writing styles while still maintaining top shelf end products... There were experimental essays here on crime which didn't have a conclusion but somehow were still interesting, there was reportage on the refugee effects on the city of Calais, or when Carrere was part of Macron's retinue on one of his first foreign trips, a heart breaking essay on the Tsunami and many more. All good but my absolutely favorite was the one where he tanked an interview with Catherine Deneuve, the one where they were extras at the World Economic Forum at Davos came a close second.

Carrere and Chee get my top billing because they prove that not only can they write about serious matters but also can create master pieces out of ordinary things. It's easy to sound smart when you are writing about Kant's categorical imperative but only Chee came out on top when writing about tending to roses in his backyard garden. Carrere earned his stripes on that essay about tanking an interview. On the face of it the subjects are mundane but what the writers produced were gems and am so glad that I read their essay collections. Highly recommended. [This edit was added later to recognise the efforts of the translator John Lambert, he is the unsung hero of this awesome English end product]

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Carrere was 'The Adversary', a book that stays with you for the story it tells (well) and the questions it raises about the reality of our identities, about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, and how little we apparently pay attention even to those closest to us. One of the most memorable books I've ever read. It's a true story (or a few true stories), and the book's power certainly comes partly from the story itself, which is deeply disturbing on several levels. But the author certainly did much more than just narrate the facts: he took us deep into the life of the protagonist, without pretending to have solved its mystery.

This book here, 'Essays', contains one piece which one assumes was the seed for the book: 'The Romand case', a condensed account of the multiple family murder that the book explores and the trial of the murder.
Summarily: the essays cover murder trials, fascinating oddballs (Philip K. Dick, Emmanuel Macron, Eduard Limonov, Catherine Deneuve), and... a bunch of other interesting themes (sorry, I'm not being paid for this and I have to go for a run).
They're all enjoyable and some of them are thought-provoking, but somehow I don't warm to Carrere as I do to other reflective writers like, say, Kundera or Dostoevsky or Houellebecq - people who are themselves oddballs and comfortable not 'fitting in'. He seems a little too reserved, detached, noncommittal, in a way that comes across to me not as objective, nor Olympian, but somehow slightly untrustworthy, not wanting to stick his neck out. But maybe it was just my frame of mind when reading it.
A note on the translation (I haven't read the original, but I wish I had): it's mostly pretty competent, but there are some minor howlers, enough to bother a fastidious reader like me, and stylistically I found myself wondering whether it was partly the translation that was putting me off Carrere.

Read it, if you like essays, reflection, thoughtful writing. Not great, but pretty good.

[Bhavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first time I am reading anything by Emmanuel Carrere and it is nice to start with his essays. The first few are very engaging. A few like the one on the politics in Russia and the time he is a writer in residence at the Santa Maddalena Foundation can be quickly skipped through. The ones I liked the most were, Three Crime Stories, The Romand Case, Philip K Dick, The Lost Hungarian, Death in Sri Lanka, Room 304, The Life of Julie and Four Days in Davos.

This is from Four Days in Davos
"They were the ones the average, reasonably well-informed Westerner asks when faced with the spectacle of financial capitalism that is obsessed with profit, heedless of its social consequences and the dizzying inequalities it creates, that for the past thirty years has been liberated of any and every form of regulation, privatizing profits and mutualizing losses, disdaining the state as a sort of remnant from Soviet times but counting on it to bail it out when the wind turns, and leading the Western countries headlong from crisis to crisis toward a catastrophe in which the middle classes look set to go down with all hands while the leaders are evacuated on helicopters."

Just to get a sense of the varied life that Mr. Carrere has spent and to look at the world from his point of view, a different point of view perhaps from yours, is worth a read.

[Robert Boyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

One gets the impression reading this that it is kind of a greatest hits--mostly it collects articles he has written, some of which he has expanded into whole books. This volume includes essays on Jean-Claude Romand and Truman Capote's method of writing In Cold Blood, which feel like a teaser for his book L'Adversaire (2000) about Jean-Claude Romand. Ditto the two articles dealing with Eduard Limonov, subject of his book Liminov. If these essays were advertisements for his book-length treatments of their subjects, Carrère is successful (at least with me)--I already ordered a copy of Liminov.

Reading this collection is extremely entertaining, but one is reminded continuously that he was writing for an erudite French readership. Many of the references sent me scurrying to google, but as I read them them, they seemed like the kind of cultural touchstones that his French readers would be familiar with.

Perhaps as a consequence, he's often most interesting to me when he takes on American subjects: Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft and, most movingly, photographer Darcy Padilla and her tragic muse, Julie Baird.

[Kathleen Hulser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting sampling of wide-ranging journalist's fare, written with passion and a voracious curiosity. His essays cover some celebs, such as a wry piece about the non-disclosures of Catherine Deneuve, appreciations of genre gumshoe, true crime, current events and plenty of profiles of odd types. My personal favorite just because it brims with detail is the Orbiting Jupiter essay. Carrere trots after the imperturbable Emmanuel Macron, who doesn't perspire and handshakes with a wrestler's intensity. Details of his working the crowd show his frightening seductiveness, the winks, the penetrating gaze, the investment bankers' breezy self-confidence. But of course an Enarque commands the suave techniques of forging networks of power. At 39, lucky boy steps into the French Presidency as the consummate insider, dressed as an outsider. Macron lays claim to "complex thoughts" possibly generated from his uniquely distant planetary position. Carrere nails him, a self-described visionary and philosopher, who deploys Hegel's "cunning of reason" to weave verbal veils around what turn out to be more humdrum policies than transformative thunderbolts.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of assorted non-fiction works: essays, introductions, columns, reports. Carrere's book begins with a piece about the grim & strange case of Jean-Claude Romand. Posing as an influential medical doctor for numerous years, Romand killed his entire family when he realized that his lies were about to be uncovered. Carrere would return to this case for a second piece in the collection & would subsequently publish a full-length book, The Adversary, about it. Also included in 97,196 is Carrere's reminiscences of reading PK Dick's short stories, a racy series of columns about the author's love life, account of a botched interview with Catherine Deneuve, a profoundly moving account of the 18 years that photojournalist Darcy Padilla spent with seropositive Julie Baird, a report on a handful of days in Davos & a week with Macron. In a piece Carrere is as likely to reference Kafka & Mann as he is to excoriate the New Age pseudo-philosophies of the elite.

[Siel Ju · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Whom your work resembles doesn’t matter that much, I believe; what counts is that there’s a resemblance.”

I’d never read any Emmanuel before, so this latest essay collection of his was a great intro to his work. They’re assorted essays ranging from free-ranging short anecdotes on hetero romantic relationships to longer newsier pieces that often hinge on one critical decision made in an otherwise unremarkable moment. The man who faked being a WHO doctor for 20 years, the woman who photographed a mostly homeless woman for many years until she died of AIDS, the Hungarian WWII soldier who got trapped in a Russian sanatorium where he couldn’t communicate with anyone for decades. In these essays Emmanuel makes himself a character as much as any of his subjects. Even when the navel-gazing feels annoying, his prose is gripping. I’ll be picking up more of hi work.

[Zhaslan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked different accounts of Russia, a mix of politics, and finally a touch upon Macron’s biography.

Qs:
•It’s like getting old: there are things you could once do, things you liked to do, that you now have a hard time doing, and you sense it that soon you won’f be able to do them at all. It’s trite, it’s terrible. It’s even more terrible when it’s not things but a single thing, and that single thing abandons you.
•... the presence of the observer invariably modifies the observed phenomenon
•In one or two generations our frenetic, desperate, money-obsessed world will have become completely incomprehensible for our children’s children: That’s how they lived, really?

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of journalistic articles published in various magazines and periodicals from the 90s onwards. I'd never heard of Carrere before, but his pieces are interesting, sometimes they seem to present life as stranger than fiction, sometimes they ask important questions which are so obvious we seem to overlook them. Whatever essay you read in this very well written collection, it will hold your attention and it will teach you something you didn't know before. By the time I was completing the final article (which is about Emmanuel Macron), I wished instead, that I was just beginning the book.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essays and reviews catch you suddenly, almost unexpectedly, because Carrère is a skillful writer and knows how to take original takes on subjects that might seem overdone upon first inspection. His reportage on Russia and Liminov is amazing, in many ways anticipating the Far Right’s metastasis beyond the fringes into the mainstream. His review and reflection on Philip K. Dick is perceptive. Like any collection, some pieces are duds: some trite reviews or ephemera of notes he mistakes for being more insightful than they are. But for those who don’t know of Carrère before reading this collection, like myself, it is a fine introduction to a truly skilled and original writer.

[Peter Allum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carrere is a highly regarded French writer and his collection of journal essays spans the period 1990 to 2017.

Carrere’s innovation as a journalist is to recognize that, by engaging with a person or story, the author influences reality, rather than being a neutral observer. Thus, Carrere writes openly about how he relates to his subjects(and how they relate to him).

While his style is engaging and he has a gift for finding offbeat subjects, I found this to be great journalism, rather than great writing. A good read, but not something I would come back to.

[Maria Ringold · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this from the library because the author is French and a journalist, so I thought it would be a mind stretch to read his essays. Boy, was it! This book is not for the faint of heart, as some of the essays explore sensitive issues like pornography, murder, and leaving one's fate up to the roll of a die. Still, Carrere's writing made me want to read more. His observations are razor-sharp as he seeks out the unimaginable and serves it up with a wry twist. I came away wanting to read more.

[Kim Shively · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carrere is just a brilliant writer. He is able to create narratives that are compelling, even when he "fails" at his assigned task (for example, at interviewing Catherine Deneuve). I especially appreciated his reporting on human-interest stories, such as those of murderers, addicts, etc. His writing is lucid and gripping and I couldn't put the book down when reading the biographical pieces

I was less interested in his reflections on his own experiences, especially his sexual experiences. (Why do older white male writers think the whole world is interested in their sex lives? We're not.)

[Bill Chenevert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of essays by a complex, successful French writer. It helps that I once identified as a writer and that I’m also an avowed Francophile. There’s some fun and maybe-a-little-horrifying stories of murder; some slightly meta explorations of authorial intent; a little too much Russian politics for my liking; and a few deeply felt thought experiments about love and lust. My kind of stuff!