Since its first day, this
novel has beaten all the records. If you have not yet read it, this is the time to go for it. Emmanuel
Carrere says it all. His family secrets, his sexual life, his obsessions. Reality or fantasm? The dividing line is sometimes not clear. While reading the
novel, the reader feels he is intruding, making him feel almost guilty, with the writer writing so openly without any inhibitions. The author of L''Adversaire (Gallimard, Folio, 2001) creates fiction on himself up to the end, does not hide anything, and sparing no one. But it is all so strong and so audacious that the pages seem to open up automatically at full speed. The book carries three parts - a sordid report in Russia, an erotic-filled love story that does not end well, flash-backs into a childhood spent under the guard of a grand father about whom nothing is said - which mingle into a brain spinning novel. The last pages, dedicated to his mother, the Academician Helene Carrere d'' Encausse, who never allowed her son to
write the book, are upsetting. On closing the book, one wonders, with eyes full of tears, if novelists are not a bit crazy. Maybe it is this craziness which is called talent. One is left wondering what next Emmanuel Carrere will be able to write after this novel.