The Autofiction Writer and the Torturer

Since the publication of his 2000 true-crime book, The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère has established himself as France’s premier nonfiction writer. Prior to The Adversary, a case study of the convicted murderer Jean-Claude Romand, who was found guilty of killing his wife, children, and parents in 1993, Carrère was best known as a novelist, publishing short allegorical works like The Mustache (1988) and Class Trip (1999), though he also worked throughout the ’80s and ’90s as a journalist. The Adversary began as a magazine assignment, and was modeled after Truman Capote’s genre-defining nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1966), with one key difference: Carrère, unlike Capote, included himself as a character in his story.