The New Yorker:

France’s renowned author, known for his penetrating portraits of murderers and disaster victims, trains his eye on his own emotional collapse.

By Ian Parker 

Emmanuel Carrère, who writes with the clear-eyed judgment of someone who has trained himself, against instinct, to take an interest in other people, was eating lunch one day last fall in a restaurant in north-central Paris. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, a film director and Carrère’s partner, had joined him; they live nearby, in an apartment as spare and as sunny as one in a yogurt commercial. The restaurant, her choice, was more modish and vegetarian than he might have chosen. Carrère’s manner was measured, almost courtly; his smile resembles a wince. After lunch, he would walk a mile and a half south, to the Palais de Justice, to spend the afternoon at the trial of men accused of involvement in the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks that killed a hundred and thirty people, ninety of them at a rock concert in the Bataclan theatre.

He’d been attending the trial since its start, weeks earlier, and his fame had initially caused a stir on the press benches. Carrère, who is sixty-four and has cropped hair and a lean, lined face that gives the false impression of a life spent outdoors, was once a novelist. Today, he is France’s best-known writer of literary nonfiction, or what one Paris critic has called “sublimated journalism.” Since the turn of the millennium, Carrère has published a series of best-sellers that set engrossing character studies—of a Frenchman who murdered his family; an optimistic young woman in a small Russian city; Luke the Evangelist—alongside what he knows about himself, including tendencies toward melancholy, vanity, and undependability. His writing’s appeal derives equally from its candor and its narrative brio. Carrère has written, “I know nothing other than my own ego.” His chosen form could be described as comparative self-portraiture: he looks out at the world, then looks in, then out again, and assembles it all into an artful collage. In his hands, the narcissistic lament “What about me?” becomes a potent observational tool. 

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