97,196 Words: Essays

By Emmanuel Carrére

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

A New York Times Notable Books of 2020

No one writes nonfiction like Emmanuel Carrère. Although he takes cues from such literary heroes as Truman Capote and Janet Malcolm, Carrère has, over the course of his career, reinvented the form in a search for truth in all its guises. Dispensing with the rules of genre, he takes what he needs from every available form or discipline—be it theology, historiography, fiction, reportage, or memoir—and fuses it under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, intellect, and wit. With an oeuvre unique in world literature for its blend of empathy and playfulness, Carrère stands as one of our most distinctive and important literary voices.

97,196 Words introduces Carrère’s shorter works to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary essays written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère’s creative life, this collection shows an exceptional mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, and treating everything from American heroin addicts to the writing of In Cold Blood, from the philosophy of Philip K. Dick to a single haunting sentence in a minor story by H. P. Lovecraft, from Carrère’s own botched interview with Catherine Deneuve to the week he spent following the future French president Emmanuel Macron, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity as it explores remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère’s own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780374716066

Emmanuel Carrére

Emmanuel Carrère (París, 1957) se ha impuesto internacionalmente como un extraordinario escritor con seis celebradas novelas de no ficción. Así, El adversario: «Novela apasionante y reflexión de escalofrío» (David Trueba); Una novela rusa: «Un relato original, multidireccional y perturbador» (Sergi Pàmies); De vidas ajenas (el mejor libro del año según la prensa cultural francesa): «Estremecedora e imprescindible» (Sònia Hernández, La Vanguardia); Limónov (galardonado con el Prix des Prix como la mejor novela francesa, el Premio Renaudot y el Premio de la Lengua Francesa): «Fascinante» (Llàtzer Moix, La Vanguardia); El Reino (mejor libro del año según la revista Lire): «Una muestra de gran inteligencia narrativa, una obra escrita en estado de gracia» (Isaac Rosa, El País); Yoga: «Un libro fuerte, instintivo y vertiginoso sobre la dura profesión de vivir» (Ángeles López, La Razón). En Anagrama también se han publicado sus libros de reportajes periodísticos Conviene tener un sitio adonde ir y Calais y su biografía de Philip K. Dick Yo estoy vivo y vosotros estáis muertos, y se han recuperado cuatro novelas de sus inicios, Bravura, El bigote, Fuera de juego y Una semana en la nieve (Premio Femina), así como el ensayo El estrecho de Bering. En 2017 fue galardonado con el Premio FIL de Literatura en Lenguas Romances y en 2021 recibió el Premio Princesa de Asturias de las Letras, ambos en reconocimiento al conjunto de su obra. Su último libro es V13. Crónica judicial. Fotografía © Maria Teresa Slanzi.

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Three Crime Stories

1. I’m Happy My Mother’s Alive

Last 21 and 22 November, a twenty-one-year-old youth, Franck B., appeared before the Melun Criminal Court for having tried to kill Hélène R., his biological mother. Here’s their story.

Twenty years earlier, Hélène R. was not yet a biological mother. She was just a single mother, panicked at what was happening to her. She’d given birth without daring to tell anyone and lost her job as a maid and the room that went with it. She dragged herself from shelter to shelter with her little boy, then with her little boy and her big belly, then with her two little boys because, repetition and hardship going hand in hand, Alexandre was born two years after Franck, to an equally anonymous father. Walled in by silence, fear, and constant rebuffs, Hélène didn’t know where to turn for help, or what sort of help she really needed. The Department of Health and Social Services, whose door you knock on in such cases, didn’t quite know either if it was better to help her keep her children or to take them away.

No doubt the boys would have suffered less if they’d been given up once and for all, rather than being shunted back and forth from negligent nanny to foster placement, but their mother couldn’t resolve herself to sever all ties. She hesitated, then came back to get them right before the cutoff date, so that the separation, which was finally consummated in 1974, took five years. Today she says that she signed the fatal document without understanding what she was doing. She also says that even after signing it, she hoped to see her children again, that she applied to the Department of Health and Social Services for permission. But this time it was too late: they’d been adopted.

All that remained for Hélène to do was cry every night, clam up as she’d always done, and console herself—while turning the knife in the wound—with the idea that somewhere in France her little boys lived with people who loved them and whom they loved.

About which she wasn’t wrong. The B.’s, who had adopted both Franck and Alexandre—rebaptized Alain because, unlike his brother, he was young enough not to remember his name—were no doubt good people.

From day one, all parents discover with amazement a sense of fear that will never leave them. Inevitably, this fear is even stronger among adoptive parents. One imagines that the B.’s felt a worried, conscientious love for the boys, considering themselves unworthy at the slightest warning sign. And the warning signs came—from Franck, as one can imagine. He was a difficult, taciturn, rebellious child. The B.’s did all they could to act as if he were really their son, and to be strict but kind. Despite this, or because of it, the typical textbook setbacks came about as the years passed, saddening Mr. B. enough for his wife to prefer not to grieve him any further by showing him what she’d found in Franck’s room, and which would later, passing from one hand to the next, send a shiver down his jurors’ spines: a printed card with which Mr. B., Mrs. B., and Alain were deeply saddened to announce the death of their son and brother Franck, aged fifteen. The date was left blank.

Franck was fifteen at the time. Two years later, the idea of searching for his natural mother added a new layer to his morose daydreaming. A child who feels misunderstood by his biological parents can always imagine that they’re not really his, that his real parents are better looking, more loving, more everything. Such dreams are generally harmless. The problem in the case of an adopted child is that it’s not just a dream, and that somewhere in the real world, unknown but real people truly occupy this coveted place, and there is no greater or more heartrending temptation than to try to find them, see what they look like, and throw your love, or your hate, or both, in their faces.

Franck was expecting everything from this reunion: an explanation of his story, and the freedom to live it fully. It seems he had no problem finding his mother: he simply contacted the Department of Health and Social Services and they gave him her name, leaving it up to him to find her address. I say it seems, as this point was the only bone of contention in a trial where no one disputed the facts: Franck’s lawyer condemned the department’s shameful irresponsibility, and the department’s lawyer did his best to clear its name, without either convincing or even really interesting anyone.

In any event: One fine day in June 1988, the telephone rang at Hélène R.’s place, in a housing project in the suburbs of Melun. Her son Frédéric, aged eight, picked up the phone and told the anonymous caller that he’d go get his mom.

One week later, Hélène R. opened the door to Franck.

He was a big, dark-haired youth, good-looking in a somber, reserved way, and was clearly trying to appear calm. The way he talked, you felt he would rather be silent: he was overly polite and almost pedantically neutral. His voice sounded almost artificial, and he looked a bit like the young zombielike actors in Robert Bresson’s films. Hélène R. didn’t think any of that, just that this person in front of her was her lost child, that he’d found her, and that was enough.

He called her Madame, then Hélène, but not Mom. He asked her questions. About his father, but that ground didn’t take long to cover because she didn’t even know his name: he was a railway worker, just passing through, that’s all. About her life, her job: she worked as a housekeeper in a hospital. About the little boy, Frédéric: she’d been able to keep him, at least; her life had become a little less difficult—she was fighting to keep him, in fact, having separated from his father, who wanted custody and who wouldn’t get it, she swore. Hearing that, Franck didn’t raise an eyebrow. He preferred to ask her about a bump he’d had on his forehead since he was little—he’d often wondered how he got it. She told him that he’d fallen down at his aunt’s place; she’d babysat him when he was three.

Hélène gave the best answers she could and hardly asked a thing. For some people, having to put up with events becomes a habit and dulls the mind. You take things as they come and aren’t surprised: that’s how things are. But as Franck was leaving, Hélène said that if he wanted to come back, the door would be open.

He came back that fall, for Frédéric’s birthday, bringing a watch as a present. Then he started coming quite often. His adoptive parents didn’t know; he didn’t talk to them—or to Alain—about his absences. Hélène furnished a room for him in her little apartment, where he came to sleep from time to time. The contrast between the affluence of the B.’s and his birth mother’s world, so bereft of grace, intelligence, scope—of everything—seemed to leave him indifferent. Except as regarded Frédéric, whom Franck would have liked to see get a better education. That his half brother was getting such a poor start in life worried Franck. He loved Frédéric and still does: he approved of his mother’s fighting to keep him.

As one can imagine, this reunion didn’t bring Franck the clarification or liberation he’d hoped for and only deepened his confusion. His double life, his secret comings and goings, quickly became unbearable. He tried to escape.

He fled to Sweden, under the pretense of doing grade twelve at the French high school in Stockholm. But he returned after just two months, and the back-and-forth started all over again. The B.’s were saddened by his absences and his mood swings. Hélène continued to welcome him with her glum, placid kindness, and her exasperating way of finding such an unbearable situation perfectly normal.

He put up with it for two years, until the day in June when he showed up at her place, without warning, as he often did. He spent the afternoon playing with Frédéric; that evening he went to visit a couple of friends, talking and playing Monopoly until dawn. At eleven in the morning he went back to Hélène’s place to take a shower and change, then the two had lunch. During the meal they exchanged a few anodyne words, nothing out of the ordinary. She did the dishes. She found him nervous, tense: standing in the kitchen, he played with one of the knives that she had just washed. She went into the dining room, switched on the television, sat down on the couch, and flipped through the TV guide. Franck stood behind her. She clearly remembers thinking that he was going to come closer, that he was expecting a gesture of tenderness, a hug. It was then that she felt something like a prick in her back. Then another, harder this time, which suddenly caused her a huge amount of pain.

Realizing that her son was stabbing her with the knife, she stood up, shouting, Franck, what are you doing? Are you nuts?

He answered, You abandoned me, my life’s the pits (or the shits, it’s the only difference in their versions). As she fell to the floor, he jumped on her and tried to cut her throat. Struggling and trying to protect herself with her hands as the knife slashed, she shouted, Franck, I love you! Then: "Think of Frédéric!" Maybe that’s what stayed Franck’s arm, maybe not, but starting that moment, both of their memories go blank.

A little later, the phone rang. Franck got up, covered his mother, whom he presumed dead, with a blue bedspread, then went to wash his hands, determined not to answer. The ringing stopped. Then Hélène moved and gasped that he should call for help. He didn’t know what to do. The phone rang again. He picked it up. It was the secretary of the ear, nose, and throat specialist, calling to reschedule an appointment his mother had made. Franck didn’t get the irony of the situation, and in any event her bloody throat was hidden by the bedspread that he’d pulled over her face. He merely told the secretary what he’d just done and asked her to send someone as quickly as possible. Fearing that he might be misunderstood or that she’d think he was crazy or a practical joker, he went and knocked on the door of the neighbor across the landing. Having informed her of the situation, he walked downstairs, sat on the front steps, and waited.

According to the policeman who arrested him, Franck was neutral, as if detached from the whole thing, and physically exhausted. He made no bones about what he’d done and even insisted that his acts were premeditated. When asked why he’d called for help if he wanted to kill his mother, he said that he was being a good citizen. After which nothing else was got out of him for some time.

Hélène was dying when she arrived at the hospital. The knife had slit her throat and basically left her without a chance, and the expert witness at the trial a year and a half later didn’t hesitate to say her recovery was a miracle. Because she survived, and even resumed a normal life.

For several months she suffered from an obsessive fear of her son. Each night, before going to bed, she inspected her apartment from top to bottom to make sure he hadn’t come back to finish her off. Convinced that he would try again if he was released, she instituted civil proceedings against him.

Then she went to see him in Fleury-Mérogis Prison. When she came back, she withdrew the charges, saying that she alone was responsible for what had happened to her. In a letter to the judge, she asked that Franck be released as soon as possible, so we can finally get some peace.

Everyone at the trial stressed his or her own responsibility, as if fearing above all to be excluded from this strange circle of love. Hélène first used the meager words at her disposal to say that everything had been her fault from the start. Not wanting to be outdone, the B.’s expressed their regret at having put Franck in a boarding school for a year, thus awakening his fear of being abandoned. Franck insisted that was not the way things were, then contradicted the court psychiatrist and in general rejected all attempts to get him off the hook. He’d known what he was doing, he said: for several weeks he’d been sure that killing his mother was the only way out of his impasse.

Near the end of the trial, presided over by a judge who was generally considered a tough nut but who showed exemplary tact and humanity in this case, Franck was asked if he regretted what he’d done. He thought about it and said, I’m happy my mother’s alive.

A strikingly precise answer. To survive and become a man, Franck B. had to kill Hélène R., his natural mother. A medical miracle allowed this murder to be committed yet annulled. Such grace is rarely accorded: a psychoanalyst or priest would no doubt also see a miracle at work. All that remained was for the jurors, to top things off, to bring about a penal miracle.

Refusing to acquit him—which by negating his crime would have insulted the accused and compromised his return among his fellow men—the court yielded to the arguments of the prosecuting attorney, a young adoptive mother. In her final submissions she gave a personal statement and the most moving of pleas. A prison sentence of three years, of which two were suspended, was handed down. The matricide Franck B., found entirely guilty of his act, left the courthouse free, and perhaps liberated. Two families, beside themselves with love, were waiting for him at the exit. He would now have to make the best of that.

Published in L’Événement du jeudi, January 1990

2. Resilience of an Infanticide

That morning, Marie-Christine was even sadder than usual when she got up. Her last sick leave was coming to an end, she was going to have to go back to the office, and Marie-Christine could no longer stand the office. It hadn’t always been like that. Before, she’d been proud of having passed the state exam and becoming a bureaucrat in charge of maintenance in a French ministry, instead of cleaning tiles in city buildings as her mother had done. But then, two years ago, her department had been computerized, coinciding with her maternity leave. When she got back after Guillaume’s birth, everything started to go wrong. Her colleagues sniggered behind her back, her superiors bullied her, she spent more and more time on sick leave, and each time it was all the more difficult to come back. This time she couldn’t. She preferred to die.

Preferring death to life, at least to hers, wasn’t new for Marie-Christine. When she was younger, she’d tried to kill herself two times, and at the start of the previous winter she’d bought a blank pistol over the counter, identical to the Smith & Wesson .22 Long Rifle you see in westerns. She kept it under Guillaume’s bed, wrapped as a present so as not to attract her husband’s attention.

To say that she loved her son is an understatement, and there was no question of her leaving him alone. So she unwrapped the package and loaded the gun while Guillaume played with the cartridges. Then she pointed the gun at the twenty-month-old’s forehead, covered her eyes with her hand, and pulled the trigger. Then she reloaded, aimed at her own forehead, and fired again. Everything should have stopped at that moment, but it didn’t. She just felt a pain between her eyes and saw the child writhing on the bed. Heaven, where she’d imagined they would meet again, didn’t look at all as she’d expected. After a quarter of an hour she called an ambulance.

When it arrived, followed by the police, Guillaume was dead. Her face covered in blood, Marie-Christine tried to steal a policeman’s gun to finish herself off, but failed. At the hospital she was just as unable to escape the care her state demanded. Fragments from the cartridge remained stuck in her forehead, causing a gnawing pain that woke her up at night and reminded her incessantly of her nightmare. Having survived her son struck her as an atrocious but logical injustice: she’d been dogged by injustice since she was born; it had eaten away at her for her entire life; of course it would end up swallowing her whole.

To a judge’s ears, murdered children evoke a familiar litany, and no one at the Nanterre Criminal Court was surprised to learn that Marie-Christine had been abandoned at a young age, that between eleven and fifteen she’d been regularly raped by a brutal, alcoholic stepfather, or that her frightened mother, paralyzed with fear, had preferred to turn a blind eye.

Despite her seemingly uneventful marriage and a social adaptation that was as commendable as it was precarious, no one doubted that the twenty-five years of her life preceding the crime had been twenty-five years of unhappiness, and taking stock of this unhappiness was part and parcel of judicial routine.

What was not part and parcel of judicial routine, by contrast, were the three years that followed the crime. They started normally, if you will: Marie-Christine cried all the time, wanted to die, and no one saw another solution. However, after she’d spent just eleven months in prison, the examining magistrate, impressed by the progress she’d made with the help of her lawyer and the various therapists dedicated to this apparently hopeless case, consented to have her released pending her trial, subject to judicial supervision.

Little by little, with the help of therapy, Marie-Christine came back to life. She went back to work, was transferred to another service, and said she was happy there. She got back together with her husband and, just nine months after getting out of prison, gave birth to a little girl. Another child was to be born in two months’ time, so she was pregnant when she appeared before her jurors.

This fact, as well as the witness statements that unanimously praised her newfound psychological balance, and given that she was feeling much better about herself, gave a strange twist to the account of Guillaume’s murder. A strange and even shocking twist, bearing in mind how hard it is to admit that someone can do such a thing and then pull through. Even harder to admit is the idea that emerged as the trial went on that this act could have been a horrible but necessary stage on life’s way—like a child abandoning his security blanket or a swimmer kicking against the bottom of the pool to come back to the surface. In killing her cherished son, one expert stated, Marie-Christine had killed the hated childhood that had prevented her from living.

The ordeal had been terrible, but now the page had been turned and the two were making a fresh start, as her timid, mustached husband confirmed on the witness stand. It was difficult not to look in horror at this man who had had the—the what? The generosity? The madness? The mercy? The love, no doubt, which is all of these together—to get back together with the woman who had killed their firstborn child. What could their life be like? Their conversations, their silences, their joys? Did they think of the child they were now expecting as their second, or their third?

A few weeks earlier I had attended another trial, that of a poor woman who, similarly distressed and confused, had let her baby die. Like Marie-Christine, she was more a victim than a criminal, everyone agreed, in spite of which she’d been given eighteen years. A terrible verdict, but one that was explained not only by the toughness of the jury but also by the fact that the woman was completely destroyed, right down the core, to the point that no development, no project, regardless how much confidence one might have in human resources, seemed imaginable for her.

The court in Nanterre, by contrast, was eager to let things develop, since—contrary to all expectations and almost contrary to all decency—it seemed that development was possible. Natural morality wants us to be more indulgent with those who suffer the most from their wrongdoings, and to go easy on those who have destroyed themselves. Opposed to this is the harsh and vitalist evangelical law according to which whoever has will be given more, while from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is the law the jury members followed. Crediting Marie-Christine for her stupefying ability to survive, they gave her back to her loved ones with a five-year prison sentence, of which four years and one month were suspended—the eleven months with no remission covering those she had already served.

To those who would be tempted, as I admit I was, to say that in this case human justice was a little quick in passing the cruel duty to punish on to God or the sinner’s conscience, I will simply repeat what Marie-Christine murmured before leaving the stand: One day I’ll have to tell my children.

Published in L’Événement du jeudi, February 1990

3. Letter to the Mother of a Murderer

It’s with a trembling hand, madame, that you start to read this article. And perhaps, once you’ve read it to the end, you’ll think I would have done better to keep my compassion to myself, rather than splashing your sadness across the sheets of a newspaper. I beg your forgiveness.

Our looks crossed from time to time during those terrible days in the courthouse at Châteauroux. At least I looked at you, a lot: surreptitiously, without daring to come up to you during the breaks to tell you about what I’m now trying to write. I was in the press stand, an amateur legal reporter, a tourist in a way, attracted by the lawyer’s reputation and the strange nature of the crime: a forty-five-year-old farmer murdered in his bed, first beaten with a bottle, then stabbed, then shot with a rifle, and finally burned, his charred corpse discovered in his devastated farmhouse. One might think his death was the result of obscure rural strife—clan rivalry, family feuds, hicks doing each other in. Nothing of the sort: the murderer, the son of a Parisian family on vacation in a neighboring village, had no relationship, no common interests, no bone to pick with the victim. No gripes, no motive. A wanton act, one concludes, meaning that the criminal is more or less a monster. And if, madame, you’ve been coming to this courtroom with your husband for the past weeks—perhaps the way as a student you used to meet your friends after their exams, to see what awaited you—and now hold him in your arms at the front of the gallery, it’s because the criminal who risks life, as the bailiff said, is your son.

It seems to me that when you sense the truth of a cliché, you can say you’ve learned something. I watched you watch him, this twenty-eight-year-old youth who looked younger, a boy, really, on his face the stubborn look of a dunce whom the teachers have long stopped questioning, in the crested blazer you bought for him so he’d look his best. Watching you watching him—he didn’t look at you, or at anyone—I got a better sense of the melodramatic words the bench of infamy and the bane of humanity. Other words came to me as well, words I’d often heard without paying them much heed, focused as I was on the music with which Pergolesi or Scarlatti had accompanied them: those of the Stabat Mater. They were about you.

For two days, following two years of nightmares and insomnia, you had to listen to the endlessly repeated tale of the evening when your son, without a reason and perhaps not knowing what he was doing—no one will ever know, not even he, no doubt—brutally killed a poor farmer whom he hardly knew and who had never done him any harm. The atrocious descriptions of the corpse, which you must have read a hundred times—or made a point of not reading, which amounts to the same thing—accompanied you throughout the trial. First the court clerk recapitulated them at the start of the proceedings, then the medical examiners recited them in detail, and then the prosecuting attorney, who was only doing his job, asked that the most horrible passages be repeated so that the jurors, steeped in horror, would give your son the max.

A crime can have no motive, but it’s sure to have a past: that of its author, whose entire life becomes the explanation for, prelude to, and cause of his act. And the younger the author, the more his parents will feel as if they’re the ones on the stand. You asked for no more than that: to be found guilty so that your son would be a little less so, to take as much of the burden as you could. You were ready to put up with the cruel paradox so often seen at court, in which the prosecuting attorney explains what exemplary parents your child has so as to hasten his downfall, while the lawyer you’re paying to defend him blames you for his neuroses and his crime. Your lawyer was talented—and compassionate—enough to avoid this rhetorical trap and put his client in a humane and poignant light without making his parents look like uncaring monsters or imbeciles, which they clearly are not. It was enough to see you, madame, and to hear you when you testified, to understand that no one, ever, could blame you as much as you have blamed yourself, day and night, rightly or wrongly, for the past two years and more.

If the unexplainable must be explained, you were wrong to entrust your son to a nanny, then to your godmother, for the first five years of his life. Those are the most formative years, the psychologists repeat. But you didn’t know, and they were formative years for you as well: for your future, for your marriage, and for your child, you thought. Seeing how hard a time he had at school, you shouldn’t have wanted him to succeed like you and your husband succeeded, by dint of hard work alone. You could have prevented—or tried to prevent—his slow slide from a sensitive, fib-prone child to an adolescent plagued by anxieties and fears, then to an immature young man sponging off his parents and his indulgent godmother, spending his time writing unpublishable science fiction novels, watching X-rated videos, and, to stem the panic that threatened to submerge him each night, swilling antidepressants and anxiety pills ten at a time.

You weren’t blind, you were worried. But you thought it was a phase he was going through, and that with time, with the love you gave him and the work he would eventually find, this prolonged adolescent crisis would pass: everything would be all right. In most cases, everything is all right; problem adolescents don’t become criminals. But your son did; no one will ever know why. Why one day he went ballistic. Why him. Why you.

Because this is really about you; I’m not the only one at court to have seen only you, thought only about you and the atrocious injustice you suffered—to the point of forgetting the victim and his family. Your lawyer spent two hours pressing that point home to the jurors, repeating again and again that if they weren’t in your place, it was due to chance and chance alone. That it would take no more than a trifle to tip the scales and turn the worries that all children give their parents into horror—because if there’s one thing worse than having a child killed, it’s no doubt having one who’s a killer. It’s terrible to say, but your being respectable people, who in the normal run of things should not suffer this sort of affliction, must have been a boon to your lawyer. All criminals have parents who care about them and their fate, but it’s easier to identify with some parents than it is with