The it’s your whole life 
Iain Bamforth
- The Adversary: A True Story of Murder and Deception by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Linda Coverdale
In the small hours of Monday, 11 January 1993, Luc Ladmiral, a GP in Voltaire-Ferney, a dormitory town for Geneva on the French side of the border, received a call to say that the house of his closest friend in the neighbouring town was in flames. When he got there, the firemen were bringing out the charred remains of the two children, Antoine (five) and Caroline (seven), and their mother Florence. Only Jean-Claude Romand, the father, still showed signs of life. He was rushed away in an ambulance, unconscious, to a burns unit across the Swiss border.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Iain Bamforth, who lives in Strasbourg, is preparing a collection of essays on literature and medicine.
Other articles by this contributor:
Take a pig’s head, add one spoonful of medium rage · the poetry of Günter Grass
print layout
tell a friend