97,196 Words

by Emmanuel Carrère, John Lambert (Translator)

Overview

A selection of the best short work by France's greatest living nonfiction writer

A New York Times Notable Books of 2020

No one writes nonfiction like Emmanuel Carrère. Although he takes cues from such literary heroes as Truman Capote and Janet Malcolm, Carrère has, over the course of his career, reinvented the form in a search for truth in all its guises. Dispensing with the rules of genre, he takes what he needs from every available form or discipline—be it theology, historiography, fiction, reportage, or memoir—and fuses it under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, intellect, and wit. With an oeuvre unique in world literature for its blend of empathy and playfulness, Carrère stands as one of our most distinctive and important literary voices.

97,196 Words introduces Carrère’s shorter works to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary essays written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère’s creative life, this collection shows an exceptional mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, and treating everything from American heroin addicts to the writing of In Cold Blood, from the philosophy of Philip K. Dick to a single haunting sentence in a minor story by H. P. Lovecraft, from Carrère’s own botched interview with Catherine Deneuve to the week he spent following the future French president Emmanuel Macron, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity as it explores remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère’s own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250758095
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	417,299
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Emmanuel Carrère, born in Paris in 1957, is a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of The Kingdom, Limonov, The Mustache, Class Trip, The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel, and Lives Other Than My Own, which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010. For Limonov, Carrère received the Prix Renaudot and the Prix des Prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013.

John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov and The Kingdom. He lives in South Korea.

Table of Contents

Three Crime Stories 3

The Romand Case 18

Philip K. Dick 30

The Lost Hungarian 38

Nine Columns for an Italian Magazine 55

Death in Sri Lanka (with Hélène Devynck) 81

Room 304, Hotel du Midi in Pont-Évêque, Isère 89

The Invisible 96

Capote, Romand, and Me 104

The Last of the Possessed 110

How I Completely Botched My Interview with Catherine Deneuve 131

"You Fool, Warren Is Dead!" 139

The Life of Julie 143

Four Days in Davos (with Hélène Devynck) 167

Generation Bolotnaïa 191

The Journalist and the Murderer Janet Malcolm 204

Resemblance 208

In Search of the Dice Man 223

Letter to a Woman of Calais 249

Orbiting Jupiter: My Week with Emmanuel Macron 276

Editorial Reviews

"What distinguishes his prose is not its lyricism—as John Lambert’s translation conveys, it is simple and spare—but his intrusive, philosophical first-person voice . . . The core of Mr Carrère’s talent is precisely that he brings readers into sympathetic contact with others, powerful and powerless, insiders and outsiders . . . It is a masterful illusion." —The Economist

"97,196 Words is Carrère’s first collection of essays to be published in English, in a smooth translation by John Lambert. Many of the pieces go behind the scenes of his books, as it were, and read like sketches for what would later become paintings . . . the essays are delightful, plunging into the mysterious minds of people who tell honest lies." —Randy Rosenthal, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"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." —William Leith, Evening Standard

"Much of D.H. Lawrence's fiction is almost innocently transgressive . . . As it happens, Emmanuel Carrère - arguably France's greatest contemporary writer of nonfiction - is similarly daring in his choice of subjects for 97,196 Words . . . Carrère's likable style isn't just conversational, it's openly confessional." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Carrère is masterly both at singling out the telling detail and of grasping and conveying his subject as a whole … This is political reportage at its most lively and acute … What is most compelling about his work is the quality of his mind, of his thinking. Of the scourging pressure of his need to understand.” —Robert Gottlieb, The New York Times Book Review

“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 … All this is delivered in Carrère’s spare and supple prose.” —Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

“Arguably France’s most original living writer of non-fiction” —Nick Rennison, The Times

“Carrère’s style mixes research and reportage with personal anecdote—he has a keen wit, unrelenting self-honesty, and a touch of naughtiness … this is an excellent launching point to begin exploring his work” —Publishers Weekly

“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.” —Tobias Grey, The Financial Times

"There is a doubleness to being there; an immediate literary and philosophical transposition that Carrère indicated the contours of in his incredible, eponymous novel as 'the Kingdom' ... The same overlay, superimposition, or resemblance is what the essays collected in 97,196 Words mean to bring out. Carrère consistently paints himself into the picture; a ploy that is his hook, his key to unlocking the truth of all his subjects." —Arthur Willemse, World Literature Today

"The essays and articles collected here are invested with empathy as well as irony and rendered in lean, evocative prose ... his writing (well translated by John Lambert) should be of interest to anyone who cares about the expressive power of words." —David Luhrssen, The Shepherd Express

From the Publisher

07/22/2019

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.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-08-19
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 Carrère'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, Carrère 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 Carrère eventually wrote, from a profile of the young, anti-Putin dissident Eduard Limonov to one on a catastrophic tsunami in Sri Lanka. 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: "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 trademark—fear." In "Four Days in Davos," Carrère 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 Carrère new readers.

Kirkus Reviews