A superb collection of essays by Emmanuel Carrère, one of the best storytellers around ... When Carrère writes a story, he knows how to stir up powerful and conflicting emotions in his reader, which is one of the reasons he’s so good ... If you’re interested in Carrère, this book of essays is a good place to start. It’s the best book I’ve read for ages.
A collection of journalistic pieces by one of France’s leading literary daredevils showcases his long-running personal investment in the mystery that is other people, while offering indirect glimpses at his longer works ... [Carrère] thrives in the interstices between philosophy, fiction, and memoir, using actual events as prompts from which to relate deeply felt confessions about life’s big questions, often departing from the strictly factual to move readers toward greater truths. Here, in pithy magazine pieces and extracts, we see the author in relatively polished form, his lively humanism and characteristically intimate voice both on brilliant display ... Readers already familiar with Carrère may not find much new here, but those just discovering him for the first time may find themselves hungry for more
... 20 essays (totaling 97,196 words) that reveal both the depth and the breadth of [Carrère's] achievement. Not that all of them are masterpieces. Carrère has done what so many self-anthologists do (I plead guilty to the same misdemeanor): He’s indulged himself by rescuing from obscurity certain stories that did not really demand rescue ... The abundant majority of the pieces in this book, however, are riveting, not least those that he later developed into full-scale books. In such cases, it’s clearly not a matter of recycling old material but of responding to an urgent need in him to know more, understand more, feel more. And we are gripped by the same pressure: No matter how often he returns to his story, we are carried along with him ... Carrère is masterly both at singling out the telling detail and of grasping and conveying his subject as a whole.
Carrère is daring in his choice of subjects ... Carrère’s likable style isn’t just conversational, it’s openly confessional ... In various essays Carrère, without a hint of sensationalism, analyzes his erotic fantasies and sexual experiences. In his final piece, he probes the astonishing charisma of France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. 'No matter what you think of him, whether you see his rise as a political miracle or a mirage destined to fade away, everyone agrees: he could seduce a chair.' Carrere’s own writing possesses a similar power.
[Carrère's] strongest writing is about the toughest material ... His essayistic style is instead an urgent sympathy, even when his subject is a creep such as Limonov ... There is, it has to be said, a sort of macho literary bravado in this performance of proximity to monsters. It affects too his essays on the writers he admires, which have a familiar adolescent flavour ... There is a great deal to admire in 97,196 Words, including the Sri Lanka piece, Carrère’s meditations on Jean-Claude Romand and a vivid, affecting essay about the ruined life of a young addict named Julie – all the more impressive for having been written at some remove, via photographs by Darcy Padilla. But a strain of boyish fantasy, mixed with middle-aged bathos, makes it too frequently hard to take Carrère seriously. (In this, he resembles Houellebecq, one of his most prominent admirers.) In a sequence of columns about his love life, written for an Italian magazine, Carrère comes off as an antique battle-of-the-sexes type; as is frequently the case, a hapless, can’t-help-it act is part of the deal.
It is difficult to like Emanuel Carrère, yet impossible not to fall in love with him a bit too ... While Carrère is happy for us to see him at his least heroic, he’s not shy about showing us what he describes as his 'amiable pornographer' side either ... At a time when 'creative non-fiction' seems to have become a synonym for memoir, it is a joy to be reminded of all the wonderful things that it can do when it looks beyond individual ego. While Carrère is hardly averse to writing about himself, he is equally happy to let other people and subjects take the spotlight ... There are wonderful explorations of what it was like to live in Calais in the 'jungle' years, or what happens behind the scenes at Davos. There’s even an excellent piece on why Janet Malcolm was wrong in her famous remark that all journalists whose work involves interviewing other people know at some level that what they are doing is morally indefensible. All this is delivered in Carrère’s spare and supple prose.
... a smooth translation by John Lambert ... Yes, the title is terrible, but the essays are delightful, plunging into the mysterious minds of people who tell honest lies ... Unlike Capote, who tells us everything about his subjects but nothing of his own involvement in their lives, Carrère is always in the scene, his faults and ignorance on full display ... by the end of the collection, we are forced to ask: What underlying lie is driving Carrère’s obsession? What lies drive us?
Carrère’s transparency about his approach is what sets him apart...In his native France it is precisely because his non-fiction exudes an erudite intimacy and lack of obfuscation that he is hailed as a writer who can be compared with Montaigne ... The most striking thing about the 20 essays here is that they all emanate more or less from the same desire of wanting to know what it feels like to be someone else. There are delicious profiles of Emmanuel Macron and Catherine Deneuve that have a ventriloquistic quality, in that what Carrère’s subjects say is often far less interesting than what he divines about their omissions.
... a useful introduction to those more substantial works ... Carrère’s work can be uneven. At his worst, he resembles a caricature of a French intellectual. His nine short columns for an Italian magazine, with their relentlessly tedious over-analysis of his and his friends’ sex lives, are near unreadable. But at his best, as he is in so much of this collection, he creates reportage that, with its insight and humanity, is closer to literature than journalism.
It's not all bleak (and, indeed, even the darker pieces show touches of humor, self-deprecating and otherwise). A profile of The Dice Man-author Luke Rhinehart goes overboard on regurgitating the contents of the cult classic, but Cockcroft-in-person nicely deflates any of Carrère's hopes of what he would find ... Carrère can never quite suppress his sense of awe about such characters, making for oddly flat portraits, rich in detail but the people themselves remaining as baffling as before; perhaps the reason Carrère is so obsessed with knowing 'what it's like to be someone else' is that he's singularly incapable of getting out of his own skin; he is so very much himself that he can't place himself in the other, no matter how much information he accumulates about them. It's part of the appeal of his writing, but also its limitation; the portraits are emptily voyeuristic -- and fascinating as such --, and as such also safe, devoid of actual insight. So also, for someone who claims to be curious about what it is like to be someone different, he gets caught up in himself an awful lot, almost always featuring very prominently in these pieces, regardless of what the subject is; it's hard not to feel that it's all about him (which, of course, can get rather wearing) ... does offer an interesting variety. While much that is covered here is familiar to dedicated readers from his other books, these nevertheless make for interesting supplementary pieces to these -- and there's also quite a bit that's not familiar. Carrère also gets around quite a bit for these pieces, adding a decent touch of the exotic, as well, and between people, places, and circumstances there's enough of the extra-ordinary here to make for consistently engaging reading.
Intensely realized and evocative reports capture the last surviving prisoner of World War II, Russian extremist Eduard Limonov, and a man who for 17 years pretended to be a doctor working for the World Health Organization ... A compelling collection, best suited for sophisticated readers up-to-date on their current affairs, and academic audiences.
... offers a fine overview of [Carrère's] career ... Carrère’s style mixes research and reportage with personal anecdote—he has a keen wit, unrelenting self-honesty, and a touch of naughtiness. Frustratingly for his longtime readers, many of the best pieces here—works about the murderer Romand, the Russian dissident Limonov, Philip K. Dick, Luke the Evangelist, and Carrère’s firsthand experience of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—cover subjects also tackled in his previously published long-form books. Fortunately, there are several other standouts ... Later works take on the migrant crisis in France and the Davos economic summit, to mixed effect ... Carrère is at his best in longer form, where his idiosyncrasies can rise to the fore, but this is an excellent launching point to begin exploring his work.
Many of these essays are shorter versions of books Carrère eventually wrote ... Carrère is always a questioner, probing as he ponders and tries to honestly assess what he sees, hears, and experiences about other people’s lives. He is especially candid in How I Completely Botched My Interview with Catherine Deneuve, and he offers an insightful profile of Emmanuel Macron, with whom he was impressed ... The best among these essays should bring Carrère new readers.
