4 ideas
In 1975 Jean-Claude Romand failed to show up for his second-year medical exam, then told his family he had passed. For eighteen years he pretended to be a researcher at the WHO in Geneva, spending his days in cafés, parked cars and forests, and living on money that relatives had given him to 'invest'. In January 1993, with the funds nearly gone and exposure close, he killed his wife, his two children and his parents, then attempted suicide and survived.
One small initial lie, a claim to have sat an exam he skipped, grows into a whole false identity because each day of keeping it up raises the cost of confessing. The deception needs no grand plan, only the repeated postponement of admission, until the only exits left are exposure or destruction.
Romand's everyday life had no content under the performance. Seen this way, the monstrous figure is less an evil agent than an absence that other people's belief kept going, which is why his motive stays unreadable even to himself.
Carrère argues that he cannot write honestly about Romand without facing why the case draws him: his own fear of being a fraud and his own gap between inner emptiness and public role. He also argues that Romand's late religious conversion may be one more self-deception, so any storyteller who supplies Romand with an inner truth risks joining the lie. He resolves this by writing in the first person and admitting his own uncertainty.