When a catastrophic tsunami interrupts their trip, Carrère is momentarily energized-“our flagging vacation had received an extraordinary jolt”-then sulkily conscious that, compared with Devynck, he’s useless. Carrère begins, “The night before the wave, I remember that Hélène and I talked about separating.” He is referring to Hélène Devynck, then a television journalist, who later became Carrère’s second wife, and with whom he has a daughter. “ Lives Other Than My Own” (2009), one of the books on which Carrère’s reputation is founded, starts with a beach vacation that he took in Sri Lanka in 2004. He can see in me things which I don’t see myself.” He’s very self-involved, but also very able to see the subtle character of others. He’ll write a passage that has a fiction writer’s fluidity and sense of drama, then reintroduce himself to the reader with a conversational aside: “You get the idea” “Maybe I’m on thin ice here, but . . .” Hervé Clerc, Carrère’s closest male friend, who has been scrutinized by him in print more than once, told me, “It’s a kind of paradox. His narrative voice is confiding, comradely. (He has written that he is “obsessed with being a great writer.”) Carrère is drawn to material in which people become cut off from the rest of us by extreme circumstances-in particular, by violence. His books often enact the experience of someone being brought out of himself-diverted from disappointment or dickishness-by the unearthing of a story worth telling and by the desire to be admired for telling it. “I’m doing the same thing in another way,” Carrère writes. Luke Drawing the Virgin.” Van der Weyden is thought to have used his own face as Luke’s. Carrère, in his portrait of Luke, cites the Rogier van der Weyden painting “ St. In his hands, the narcissistic lament “What about me?” becomes a potent observational tool. 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. His writing’s appeal derives equally from its candor and its narrative brio. ![]() 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. 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. ![]() He’d been attending the trial since its start, weeks earlier, and his fame had initially caused a stir on the press benches. ![]() 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. Carrère’s manner was measured, almost courtly his smile resembles a wince. ![]() The restaurant, her choice, was more modish and vegetarian than he might have chosen. 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. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Įmmanuel 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.
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