97,196 words Essays

This selection of short nonfiction by Carrère (The Kingdom) offers a fine overview of his career, with essays spanning 1990--2016. 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: "Nine Columns for an Italian Magazine" delves into Carrère's thoughts on dating, with an increasingly humorous meta aspect, and "In Search of the Dice Man" details Carrère's encounters with the elusive Luke Rhinehart, pseudonymic author of the 1971 book The Dice Man, the "object of a minor but persistent cult." Later works take on the migrant crisis in France and the Davos economic summit, to mixed effect. An insightful profile of French president Emmanuel Macron closes the collection. 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. (Nov.)

A collection of essays by one of France's most acclaimed nonfiction authors.Originally published in France in 2016, these pieces, published between 1990 and 2017, encapsulate novelist and filmmaker Carrre's (The Kingdom, 2018, etc.) career as a journalist who places himself in his writing and subject matter. In the first piece, the author, then a fledgling crime reporter, recounts the trials of three murderers. Then he explores the life of Dr. Jean-Claude Romand, another murderer who "wasn't even a doctor" and whose "duplicity" lasted for 18 years. In another essay on Romand, the impostor, Carrre writes that he hopes to "emulate" Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in a book that would recount Romand's "life from the outside," noting that the "presence of the observer invariably modifies the observed phenomenon." He fulfilled that hope in The Adversary (2000). Many of these essays are shorter versions of books Carrre eventually wrote, from a profile of the young, anti-Putin dissident Eduard Limonov to one on a catastrophic tsunami in Sri Lanka. Carrre 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: "When it's not Hegel he's quoting, it's Spinoza." There is also a piece on the stories of Phillip K. Dick and a brief assessment of an H.P. Lovecraft story full of "Lovecraft's trademarkfear." In "Four Days in Davos," Carrre writes that he "wants to laugh aloud at the endless stream of infatuated, overbilled [economic] statements." The best piece is the emotional "Letter to a Woman of Calais," about the plight of migrants, mostly Syrian, in the city by the Chunnel. Their camp, the "Jungle," is "a nightmare of misery and filth."The best among these essays should bring Carrre new readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.