Emmanuel Carrère
L'avversario

While I read this book, I feel an inconsolable cold. It seems as if I'm wandering with Jean-Claude Romand in those woods of lies, sensing the excruciating passage of time as he sits for hours in his car, in some anonymous parking lot, pretending to live another life. Opening the pages of this nimble Adelphi volume is almost a perversion; I feel like I'm giving in to greed, to insatiable curiosity, and the desire to peer into the abyss of the soul to observe it closely, scrutinizing its deepest recesses.

It is obscene, what is recounted here, and at the same time revealing. Because by observing the story and the man with such intellectual honesty, with a disposition so pure and free from prejudice, Carrère ultimately illuminates everything surrounding this monstrous deformation. Romand exists as an extreme result of that system of rules, limits, and allowances that is our society. His atrocities are nothing but a system error (and consequence of that system), a void of attention and care that allows the abscess to grow out of control, enabling Jean-Claude to live for decades a life that doesn’t exist, pretending to be a researcher at WHO in Geneva, when he stopped at the second year of Medicine.

The most incredible thing about this truth-novel is that it opens with a sheer horror, Romand’s killing of his wife, children, and parents, but as it progresses, the investigation of the causes does not diminish this horror, rather, if possible, it amplifies it, but in a completely different sense: it places it in a context that should be organic, yet proves perfectly alien, inhuman. Why did the man lie? What drove him to such distortions of reality to not admit he failed a university exam?

I believe that the madness of the man cannot be separated from the distortions of the society in which he is embedded: on one side, the public ridicule in the face of failures and the consequent terror it stirs in the fragile soul of Jean-Claude. On the other, the incredible inconsistency of human relationships, the fallacy of connections, the superficiality of conversations. The adversary moves in the empty space between one speech and another, carefully contemplating how to continue the pretense to save appearances and therefore the happiness of his loved ones.

The true horror then reveals itself to be that of life, a deracinated and frivolous everyday existence that allows a sick man to lie flagrantly and get away with it for decades, a world all in appearance, where no one truly cares about others’ lives. Romand is at heart, if it can be said, also a victim of societal rigidities and norms, of bourgeois decorum, where a failure by a bright boy like him is unacceptable. The fictitious life he invents is exhausting, a torture that is a devotional act to the sacred appearances that are the true engine of horror. Everything can be sacrificed on the altar of social conventions, and those endless hours of absolute void, every day, for Romand are a fair price to pay.

Such a cognitive effort carries perhaps even the revelation of the overall inconsistency of our lives; the entire daily theater loses dangerous meaning when faced with such an affirmation of what we like to define as “demonic,” but only because we cannot comprehend it, or rather, because it contradicts those seemingly perfect roundness that are the bourgeois system we adhere to. In reality, that Satan of the title is nothing but a child of the Paradise we think we are living in. A degenerate child, but still a child.

The effort to understand is the true protagonist of the book, as we follow step by step the discoveries of the author who demonstrates extraordinary sensitivity and a great independence of thought. A prose that seems simple, yet is inexorable in its deductions, describing only what is strictly necessary for an accurate understanding of the man's soul. Thus, in a little over 160 pages we find ourselves disarmed, profoundly alone in this desert of empathy that surrounds us. Or perhaps, the only consoling note of such a story lies precisely in the empathy that Carrère manages to reserve for Romand, this superhuman effort to understand is the only consolation to be drawn from this hell.