In 1993, France was shocked by a terrible murder. Jean-Claude Roman, aged forty, killed his wife, two small children and parents. Heavy suspicion weighed on him and the fact that five years earlier he had also killed his father-in-law. Writer Emmanuel Carrere (b. 1957), after reading the news in the newspapers, sent a letter to the killer and asked for a meeting. He will answer in two years. In the end, the meeting will take place, Carrer will appear in court, correspond with him within three years (p. 196) and, seven years later, in 2000, his novel The Adversary will finally be published (in the same year and on: “The Enemy”, the twenty-first edition, from which almost all of his other books translated into our language come out). Killer Jean-Claude Roman introduced himself to his entourage as a doctor, dropping out of his sophomore year, and as a researcher at the World Health Organization, where he had never set foot. He lived his whole life in a lie, he was a virtuoso of lies. Everyone believed him. A little childish lie that gave rise to thousands of others not to be exposed. The novel became his lie. The lie will lead him to embezzle foreign money and, when it can be exposed, to heinous crimes so that the only people he cares about will not know. When he ends up in prison, it is now known to everyone, Roman lives “an absolutely unprecedented spiritual freedom” (p. 40), “life has never been so good. I am a murderer, I have the worst image in the eyes of society, but this position is easier to bear than the previous twenty years of lies ”(pp. 171-172).

Carrera is not interested in the facts when he decides to meet and write about Roman, but in what went on in the man’s head during the thousands of hours that he said he was in his office and was not, but wandered through the forest (p. 30-31) what went on in his head when he filmed himself and his children to watch The Three Little Pigs just before they were killed (p. 149). This decision puts him in a difficult position, as it necessarily puts him on the side of the murderer (pp. 41, 44). If the author wants to understand what was going on in Roman’s soul, there is an expectation on the part of the killer: he expects the author to make the terrible story more understandable to him and the world (p. 38). What answer did Carrer finally give to the questions that prompted him to deal with this nightmarish story? Actually none! He simply confirms his original intuition, namely that what Roman did was the act of a man “driven to the extreme by forces beyond his control” (p. 32). Yes, but what are these powers? This is the enemy, the author answers already from the title of the book, the enemy of God and man: “this[ς] whom the Bible calls Satan, that is, the enemy” (p. 24), is the “subject” of Christian literature. By the title of the novel, Carrer does not mean that Roman is a demon, but that the darkness of his soul cannot be explained, that there is no human answer to what he did. The ultimate evil is not explained, it is not rationalized, it is left unexplained in order to confuse and frighten us with what a person can do to a person, even to his own child.

What was going on in the mind of a man who was filming watching The Three Little Pigs with his children right before he killed them?

After the initial letter he sent to Roman, and until he responded, Carrère would write the novel Lessons in the Snow (Twenty-First Editions, 1997 / La Classe de neige, 1995). A ten-year-old boy is overwhelmed by a pervasive anxiety that invents and constantly feeds his fears and nightmares. Who can know what is going on in the soul of a child, what fears and worries torment him? What the little boy fears at the moment of the first awakening of his sexuality is that he suspects and anticipates his father, which he cannot say until reality confirms his fears: his pedophile father is the killer of the little boy. . Roman will read the novel and tell Carrer “how accurate the account of his childhood was” (p. 50). Was it really? Who can answer? In prison, Roman converts to Christianity. Is this true or “is the enemy deceiving him again?” (p. 205). No one knows. “For what is human does not listen to what is human” (1 Cor. 2:11)?

I copy the last line of the novel: “I thought writing this story could only be a crime or a prayer.” I unconditionally believe in the latter, because in order to talk about abomination, about the blackest darkness, without painful ambition, “one must believe that there is a light in which everything is created, even an excess of suffering and evil, this will be understood.” (page 39). He will understand that the ultimate evil, murder, belongs to the existential possibility of man, but he will never understand – there is no need for this – the method and cause that gave rise to it in the human soul. Carrer, at least at the time of writing, believes that this light exists and has a Name! Anyone who thinks that what I am writing here about Carrera’s novel is an indirect commentary on what various people who know the science of the soul, about the motives and psyche of the modern Greek child killer, say and write with absolute certainty, has not fallen out of the rut. .