Class Trip by Emmanuel Carrère

You know the one about unhappy families being unhappy in their own way? This little book is about a family that's unhappy in a terrible way. There's an undercurrent of foreboding throughout the book that must have had an effect on me as I woke myself up with a muffled scream on the night I finished it. Perhaps I shouldn't have read it into the night.

The story is about Nicolas, a pre-pubescent boy who goes on a class skiing trip. Nicolas is like many a boy at the cusp of puberty, trying to make friends, belong and come to terms with his nascent sexuality. His family life is characterised by heavy silences, shadows, abrupt changes and apprehension. His father is full of suppressed rage and takes up every available room in the family's life, whether he's there or not. The father is often absent as a travelling salesman of prosthetic limbs. His mother is fearful and also emotionally suppressed. There's a heartbreaking joylessness to their existence.

At the ski chalet, Nicolas makes friends with a boy called Hodkann. Nicolas also bonds with a skiing instuctor called Patrick. The juxtaposition between his easy, fun relationship with Patrick acts as a contrast to the one Nicolas has with his intense, maudlin dad. There's a gradual reveal of what haunts this family.

Nicolas has a very vivid and ghoulish imagination. He imagines all manner of tragedies befalling his dad, the children at the ski chalet and always with blood and gore strewn around. How much of this is the fruit of a childish imagination or the family atmosphere is anyone's guess.

I enjoyed the story despite its grim source of inspiration, the real life case of a family annihilator. In his book of essays, 97,196 Words, Carrère includes two essays about the case. The first is from 1996, The Romand Case in which Carrère gives a summary of the case. The second, Capote, Romand, and Me, is from 2006, and it opens thus:

In January 1993, Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife, his children, his parents, and his dog, and tried unsuccessfully to kill himself. In the days that followed, it came out that he wasn’t either a doctor or a researcher at the World Health Organization, as everyone thought, and that everything that was known about his life was untrue. While still a student, he claimed he’d passed a medical exam that he didn’t even take. From that point on he told lie after lie for eighteen years, and against all likelihood he was never caught. He wasn’t a doctor, but he wasn’t anything else either: neither a spy, nor an arms dealer, nor an organ trafficker, as people had initially believed and hoped—preferring anything to admitting that someone could be nothing at all. He spent his days in his car, at highway rest stops. And when he realized that people were finally starting to get suspicious, he preferred to kill his family rather than face their disappointment.

Carrère tells of his grim fascination with the convicted family murderer, and recounts attempting to get access to him after he was arrested. "I wrote to him and told him that I wanted to understand, to correspond, to talk with him. He didn’t answer. I dropped it. Then I started a book of fiction, Class Trip, which on the face of it had nothing to do with the Romand case, yet which dealt with exactly the same thing: a murdering father, a child caught up in lies, steps in the whiteness, emptiness and absence."

Once Class Trip was published, the convicted quintuple killer read it in prison and wrote to Carrère, saying it reminded him of his own childhood. Carrere then spent 5 years following in the family annihilator's footsteps, met his acquintances and read stacks and stacks of case files, to write The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, which was adapted into a film.

Class Trip was also adapted into a film, La Classe de Neige (YouTube, French trailer), directed by Claude Miller with the screenplay writted by Carrère himself. A small fact that Emmanuel Macron revealed to Carrère's surprise when Carrère was trailing the French leader during the 51st G7 summit in 2025.

The Class Trip is a short book touching on intractable forces acting on a childhood, the powerlessness of being a child and the obliteration of innocence.

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