Customer Reviews

The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book clearly deserves more than five stars for its unvarnished look at the self-serving avoidance of psychological risk that led innocents to be fleeced and slaughtered. Truth is stranger than fiction. The actual accounts here would be rejected by any fiction editor as being unbelievable. The extraordinary ability of M. Carrere to point out the wrongs in all of their many dimensions makes this journey into madness worth taking for the reader.

This is a story of such horror and depravity that many will be shaken to their roots by it. If such stories upset you or make it difficult to sleep, perhaps you should read this on happy days and in the morning.

On January 9, 1993, Jean-Claude Romand, well-regarded medical researcher with the World Health Organization, killed his wife and three children. Then he had lunch with his parents and killed them. Later, he picked up his mistress and tried to kill her. The next day, he took an overdose of outdated barbituates and set his house on fire. Romand was rescued from the flames while he was unconscious, and made to stand trial. Journalist Emmanuel Carrere was moved to sort out what led to these horrors and what ensued since then.

Actually, Romand was not a doctor. He did not even have a job. He spent his life pretending that things were normal and he was a model citizen, while nothing about him was as it seemed.

He maintained his deception by behaving as though he was like everyone else, and persuading people to have him manage their money in a Swiss bank account. Meanwhile, he spent the money on himself, his family, and his mistress. Even the people who had gone to medical school with him and remained his friends and neighbors never realized what was going on.

The deception started when he could not bring himself to take his final examination for the second year of medical school. When time came for the make-up test, he skipped that too. No one of his classmates noticed that his name was not among those who had passed, and for the next several years he was able to reenroll in medical school as a second year student and pretend to study. The elaborate fiction built from that slim base.

To realize how unusual this was, his later wife was also a medical student at the same time and failed the exam that Romand skipped. As a result, she dropped out of medical school and became a pharmicist. That route would have been available to Romand as well. But he did not take it.

They struck up a correspondence based on Romand's liking of the author's book, and Romand helped him to recreate the events. M. Carrere felt that Romand "was counting on me more than the psychiatrists to explain his own story to him . . . ." "This responsibility frightened me."

In a time when studies have demonstrated that 80 percent of all people lie on their resumes, what is fascinating is how gullible everyone was. His wife didn't think that it was strange that she could not call him at the office. People took it at face value that he could earn them 18 percent interest in a Swiss bank (which normally pays much lower interest rates). As P.T. Barnum used to say, "There's a sucker born every minute."

While most con men are satisfied to take money, Romand wanted everyone's good esteem even more. If he could not keep that esteem, he killed to keep from having to face the emotional scenes that would follow. With a rich fantasy life, he could always find a self-serving excuse for his behavior. So even in killing loved ones, he thought more in terms of this being suicide. Everything in the world was about him, in his view. His "long imposture [was] only a pathetic mixure of blindness, cowardice, and distress."

This psychology has continued to be pathological since he was confined to prison (being eligible for parole in 2015 -- watch out!). He now plays the role of model prisoner who has found religion, rather than the role of model citizen. In performing in this way though, the author says and asks, "He is not putting on an act . . . but isn't the liar within him putting one over on him?"

You will be haunted by the author's final word on the case: "I thought that writing this story could only be either a crime or a prayer." I think he succeeded in turning it into a prayer. You'll have to read the book and decide for yourself.

My suggestion is that you be more suspicious. Check out the resume details in the future. Cross-check on those who are about to marry into your family. See what your children are really doing. Although you probably do not have a Romand lurking, you may have a less sinister version who can still cause lots of harm.

Uncover the reality beneath the iron mask!

I became a fan of Emmanuel Carrere's work when The Mustache was first published in English. I was impressed by the growth in Carrere's skill in The Class Trip. Unfortunately, The Adversary struck me as simply a pleasant summer read. I must admit, however, that true crime is not my favorite genre.

The problem with The Adversary is inherent in its subject - the criminal himself has lived so many lies that he has no idea of who he really is. Carrere in depicting Romand as honestly as possible depicts a "generic lie" person ... a person who "exists" only to the extent that other individuals substantiate ... even if Romand, himself, does not remember. In this context, Carrere is forced to insert himself into the story, explaining both how he came to write the story and some of the difficulties in doing so.

The result is an excellent semi-journalistic account of Romand's life and trial - probably an excellent book for those with an interest in true crime stories. For those whose enjoyment is in Carrere's ability to depict human fear, confusion, horror this book is ultimately unsuccessful. Romand is so far from the norm that insight into his plight sheds little light on the human plight.

I finished this book late last night and it still haunts me. It has a genuine chance to be recognized as a cult classic, at least. It's the story of a man whose entire life was a lie, who hadn't drawn an honest breath since his university days. When his world threatened to collapse he murdered his wife, his two small children, his elderly parents, and tried to kill his mistress (and probably murdered his father-in-law several years before.) The book is less than 200 pages long, but it has the depth and impact of a much larger work. Carrere's style is both elegant and clear, and he teases the most subtle and difficult implications out of the material, both philosophical and religious ("adversary" is, of course, a Biblical name for Satan.) As Romand claims to get religion while incarcerated, and as he is aided by some saintly (or naive?) prison volunteers, the book moves from consideration of one horribly ugly case to a meditation on radical evil and the possible circumstances of repentance. The author shows great psychological insight, and one of the most chilling things about the book is how Carrere makes you empathize with Jean-Claude Romand, crook and damned murderer of five. (I now absolutely have to read his other books. And will someone in the U.S. publish his biography of Philip K. Dick? It's got to be a doozy, given the virtuosity and subject matter of this one.) The final paragraphs of this book are terrifying and will stay with you; the reader is forced to consider the palpable presence of "the adversary.". Not just a true-crime book, but a genuine work of literature.

A well-mannered restraint suffuses this narrative about a man who murdered his wife, his two children and his parents, but wasn't able to kill himself. In relating this striking tale of psychological cowardice and narcissistic madness, French novelist and screenwriter, Emmanuel Carrère, has chosen to avoid sensationalism, to underwrite and to underplay. One is reminded of the style of Albert Camus in his novel The Stranger, and especially the flat tone of his narrator, Meursault, whose lack of affect made him the fascinating anti-hero of a generation.

Jean-Claude Romand, the real-life murderer here, is a study in sociopathic narcissism but is unlikely to become anybody's anti-hero. He spent most of his adult life pretending to be a doctor, fooling everybody he knew including his wife and best friend into thinking he worked as a researcher at the World Health Organization. He supported himself and his family by stealing the funds of his parents and friends while pretending to invest the money in high yield Swiss accounts. That he was able to get away with this for something like seventeen years is amazing. It reminds us once again of the power that charismatic and smooth-talking sociopaths have over ordinary people. I am also reminded of Jeffrey MacDonald from Joe McGinnis's Fatal Vision. I see a type of person who has no feelings for anybody but himself, but who works the normal human feelings of others to his advantage. Jean-Claude Romand's particular weirdness was that he got great pleasure from being self-effacing, modest and humble, whether as a fake doctor working for the good of humankind, or as a man suffering from a fake incurable cancer. That he was able to turn his imprisonment into something of a heroic martyrdom in his own mind, is not surprising. There is an old joke about a man who felt so sorry for himself that he pleaded in court for mercy after murdering his parents since he was now an orphan. Jean-Claude Romand is such a man, a man who can only feel his own pain, not that of others, a man who murdered his family without compunction and then felt sorry for himself because of the tragedy he had to endure.

I have often wondered about such people, the so-called psychopaths among us. What I wonder is, are they a completely different type of human being from the rest of us, or do we deceive ourselves? Is it possible that they are only an extreme example of what we ourselves are?

A book like this makes us wonder even more. How a man who seemed to love his family, who called his parents every night before going to bed, who cuddled his children and loved his wife, who seemed normal and admirable to his friends, a person whom others trusted with their life savings--how could he suddenly be exposed as a pitiless fraud and a murderer? How could everybody be so wrong about him?

In the jungle, animals prey on other animals, sometimes by taking advantage of a weakness, as when a spider spins a web that the fly doesn't see, or because of their superior strength, as when the tiger fells the lamb. Do the sociopaths among us, some not actually violent, as Romand wasn't until his money ran out, have a kind of talent or psychological trick of behavior that takes advantage of our weakness? Are they a kind of monstrous humanity that preys upon society like a parasite that is so camouflaged that it cannot be distinguished from its prey?

Carrère's point of view, that of a writer who thrust himself into this man's life, forced him to examine his feelings toward this man whom he had in some sense befriended. What effect did this conjoining have on Carrère?

Carrère answers this question. He writes after seeing Romand become filled with the joy of Christ's love and forgiveness, the tears running down Romand's cheeks, that he does not believe that Romand "is putting on an act," but that "the liar inside" of Romand is "putting one over on him." (p. 191) In short, Carrère believes that the "adversary" is deceiving Romand once again. The "adversary," by the way, is defined by Carrère as another name for the devil.

Pardon me for not being completely satisfied with that. Romand fools himself always so that he may live with himself, so that he will not fall into the state of depression that he so richly deserves, but let's not conjure up any devils to blame. To know all is to forgive all, it is said, and Christ does indeed forgive all, but in this world among others we must obey the laws of people, and if we do not we must pay the price and accept the responsibility. Romand is, was, and will be the monster, the man who murdered his wife, his parents and his little children in an attempt to save himself from the pain of exposure. That's the bottom line. May GOD have mercy on his soul.

Read more like a newspaper article. Not very suspensful. Would have been better if the author had tried to get into the head of Romand, tried to understand his motives, but this reads like a 3rd person account and isn't very intruiging.

Emmanuel Carrère's true crime story The Adversary begins with one of the most arresting first lines I have ever read: "On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son." What follows is the nearly unbelievable story of Romand, who deceived his family and his closest friends for eighteen years, convincing them that he was a prominent doctor employed in Geneva by the World Health Organization. In fact, Romand had never finished medical school, and he spent his days reading newspapers in cafes or taking walks in the woods. He supported himself and his family on money he swindled from friends and relatives, trusting souls who, incredibly, rarely asked about the status of the considerable sums Romand had allegedly invested for them.

Romand's story might be just bizarrely amusing--a French variation of the life of deceit adopted by Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Catch Me If You Can, albeit with a less clever protagonist--were it not for what happened next. When Romand's deceit was likely to be uncovered--he had drained dry the well of his acquaintances' bank accounts--he murdered his wife and his parents, his five-year-old son and his daughter, and he tried, but only half-heartedly, to kill himself.

As the first sentence of Carrère's book suggests, the author periodically interjects his own experiences and responses into his narrative. He is clearly concerned with separating himself from the small "club" of Jean-Claude's devotees, Christian prison visitors who have come to admire the murderer in his new role as repentant sinner, the anguished prisoner who has found God and, condemned to life, assumes his suffering as some sort of expiation for his crimes. Carrère is rightly appalled--at least to an extent--by these do-gooders, and he does manage to succeed, I think, in distancing himself from them. The author is decidedly not an apologist for Romand. Carrère's account of Romand's life and crimes, meanwhile, despite its horrific subject matter, is riveting.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Jean-Cluade Romand... a man, a monster, a mystery. Romand expended an inordinate amount of energy fabricating the kind of image and existence he longed to have, but could never quite realize. From a void, he fashioned a make-believe life. Romand spent decades deceiving his friends, college classmates, his wife and children, his parents, and himself. Obviously brilliant, had Romand expended even half the energy and intellect it took for him to so artfully lie, he probably could have been the man he dreamed of being. However, crippled by depression and a mental disorder for which there is no adequate diagnosis currently available, Romand was but a ghost of a man... a lonely, empty, black hole. Was Romand sociopathic? Perhaps. But the diagnosis of sociopathy does not even begin to describe the mental and emotional vortex into which Romand descended.

Every morning for more than twenty years, dressed in a business suit and pressed shirt, Romand snapped his leather briefcase closed and left his home... to do nothing. Never having graduated from college, never having held a job, having stolen every penny he ever spent, it is beyond comprehension that Romand was capable of deceiving so many for so long. Of all the potentially painful circumstances from which Romand wriggled free with unbelievable lies, his fear of exposure finally came to fruition when he realized he no longer had money or any means of obtaining money. The motive for murdering his children, his wife, and his parents was predicated upon fear... fear of the loss of the man he never was. As his house blazed with fire and smoke choked his lungs, in the end, Romand was not even successful in taking his own life. Cowardice reigned even then.

This book is more than compelling True Crime. The focus of the manuscript lies not with the Crime, but with the Truth that forever escaped Jean-Claude Romand. Writing masterfully and gracefully, Emmanuel Carrere tells an awe inspiring, tragic story of deception and loss. More bizarre than any fictional novel, THE ADVERSARY is not to be missed.

I got this book in the mail yesterday, and finished it today. Wow, what an amazing book.

Carrere explores the moral disintegration of Jean-Claude Romand which begins when he cannot admit his failure at medical school, and culminates eighteen years later when, on the verge of being exposed as a fraud, he massacres his family. As Carrere points out, the problem with Romand's medical school exam could likely have been remedied by a talk with the dean of the medical school; instead, paralyzed by depression, he compounded his problems by a web of lies that gradually engulfed his life. He led his family and friends to believe he was a successful and famous medical researcher for the World Health Organization; in fact, he was not a doctor at all, and when he left home every morning ostensibly to go to work, he actually spent the time in cafes, bookshops, and taking long walks in the woods near the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

This book is unusual in the way Carrere gives a very nuanced and plausible exposition of the path that led Romand from a fairly normal, introverted youth to the role of murderous killer of his family. As I reached the part of the book where Romand kills his family, Carrere has made it so plausible that I found myself nodding in agreement with his decision to do away with his children, his wife, and his parents, and their dogs. This book is very subtle; the author does not resort to any of the stilted ways of thinking that too often take the place of thought when people try to understand horrible crimes. Carrere inserts very dry observations that amused me. Noting that, during his first examinations by psychiatrists after being found to have killed his family, Romand seemed pathetically concerned with making a favorable impression on his psychiatrists, Carrere notes, "He was obviously underestimating the difficulty of giving a favorable impression when one has just murdered one's family after having deceived and defrauded one's relatives for eighteen long years."

After giving this quite compassionate treatment of what led the man to kill his family, Carrere seems to catch himself at the end, and admits that he is shocked by the close friendship that has arisen between Romand and a small group of Christians who minister to inmates. These Christians natter over his comfort in prison: "He already has the blue pullover, which is warm; but it would also be good if he had the grey Polarfleece sweater." Carrere thinks that these people's tenderness toward Romand, and Romand's embrace of Christianity, and its message of forgiveness and redemption, are unseemly in light of the horrific act that Romand committed, and Carrere suggests that Romand's embrace of the message of forgiveness is just another lie that he is telling himself.

I consider this book the equal of another favorite of mine, Janet Malcolm's The Crime of Sheila McGough. Carrere's book has all the depth and nuance of that book.

"One the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993 while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting." So begins this absorbing non-fiction account of murder and deception in France. At the heart of this story is Jean-Claude Romand, a noted physician with the World Health Organization, a groundbreaking researcher with connections to international humanitarian, a financial wizard entrusted with his in-laws savings, a devoted husband and father and a loving son who called his parents every night. But the carefully developed façade of this successful man begins to disintegrate revealing the true Romand: a man who never graduated from medical school let alone obtained a license, a swindler and a [...] who used the money of trusting relatives and friends to pay for his comfortable middle class life, an unemployed lout who spent his days after supposedly leaving for work aimlessly wandering. Romand was a smooth, accomplished liar whose entire life was a tissue of deception. Faced with [...]. So he murders his wife, their two children and his mother and father and then makes a half-hearted attempt at suicide. Even after he has been caught red-handed, Romand is incapable of telling the truth, spinning preposterous tales as the police carefully catalogue his monstrous crimes. In chilling, precise prose the book explores the life of Jean-Claude Romand and how his utter inability to face reality compels him to murder. Part matter-of-fact crime drama and part psychological analysis, "The Adversary" is a fascinating, often sympathetic portrait of a pathological liar who lies first to himself before anyone else.

In his second year of medical school the culprit misses his final exam and does not retake it.Perhaps he was lazy,scared,depressed,whatever.This starts a chain of events that keeps him a second year medical student for 12 YEARS until someone finally questions his presence!
Now he is out in the real world masquerading as a doctor with the WHO and manages to maintain a middle class lifestyle for himself and family which even would include a mistress.But then why not since the idea of a moral value never occurred to him.
How he did this intersts me much more than the why and I found the explanations unsatisfying.

Personally I found this culprit so utterly despicable I cannot even fathom he had ANY reason for any action of his life other than it was easiest at the time.In spite of the authors best efforts to discover the why...I don't even think Satan would give him the time of day.

Now he is serving 22 years in a French prison taking classes and hiding behind religion.

Please no one tell me he could any way have profitted from this book!