The Adversary Emmanuel Carrere Bloomsbury, 216pp, £6.99 ISBN 0747551898
This is the account of a celebrated murder case in France. For 18 years, Jean-Claude Romand lived a life of elaborate deceit, working, or so his family thought, as a researcher at the World Health Organisation in Geneva. In truth, he had never qualified as a doctor, and spent much of his student life as an impostor, a ghostly presence who attended lectures without ever registering officially at the university. His deceit continued into adulthood. He swindled money from trusting relatives, claimed to be suffering from cancer, and left for work each morning, crossing the border into Switzerland, where he idled away the long, dead days in hotel rooms, at service stations or wandering in the woods. On the point of being found out, he murdered his wife, her parents, and his own children. He then failed to kill himself. A talented novelist, Emmanuel Carrere writes well about the "vast beach of dead and empty time" where Romand spent most of his life, and perceptively about how we all create fictive identities, alternative selves to compensate for the people we never became. This book, although inadequately translated, is a small masterpiece of imaginative reportage.
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