By breaking with Capote’s model — by “saying yes to the first person,” as Carrère puts it — he had found his way. When his book, “The Adversary,” was published in 2000, not everybody liked it, neither in France, where Carrère was already well known for his novels and screenplays, nor abroad, where he was largely unknown. But the book became a tremendous success, signaling a new approach to the writing of nonfiction: deeply personal, deeply empathetic, disconcertingly self-revelatory. Carrère spared no one, least of all himself. Each of his books became not only a superb account of its subject but a painful report of the author’s struggle to find a way to write it. His reputation grew with every book, until in an excellent profile of him published in The New York Times Magazine in 2017, Wyatt Mason could state with authority: “If Michel Houellebecq is routinely advanced as France’s greatest living writer of fiction, Carrère, whose prose is no less remarkable for its purity and whose vision is no less broad, is widely understood as France’s greatest writer of nonfiction.”

That is why the publication of “97,196 Words” is of such consequence. Here, in roughly the order of their original publication, are 20 essays (totaling 97,196 words) that reveal both the depth and the breadth of his achievement. Not that all of them are masterpieces. Carrère has done what so many self-anthologists do (I plead guilty to the same misdemeanor): He’s indulged himself by rescuing from obscurity certain stories that did not really demand rescue. (An embarrassing failed interview with Catherine Deneuve; an aborted proposal for a screenplay about a boy who can, at will, become invisible; a tribute to H. P. Lovecraft; a sardonic take on the World Economic Forum in Davos — all of these provide clues to untangling his psyche, but perhaps are more important to the history of his psychoanalysis than to the history of his art.) The abundant majority of the pieces in this book, however, are riveting, not least those that he later developed into full-scale books. In such cases, it’s clearly not a matter of recycling old material but of responding to an urgent need in him to know more, understand more, feel more. And we are gripped by the same pressure: No matter how often he returns to his story, we are carried along with him.

One of his recurring subjects first appeared in the magazine Télérama in 2001. Carrère is in Nyiregyhaza, a small town in northeastern Hungary, to film the return to his birthplace of an old man named Andras Toma who has recently become renowned as the last World War II prisoner of war to be repatriated — 56 years after he was captured by the Russians and washed up in a small psychiatric hospital in a consummately dreary city a long way northwest of Moscow. (“It’s a gray, muddy backwater,” Carrère tells us, “where for the past 10 years not a single house has had hot water.”) The place is called Kotelnich, and no one has ever heard of it or wants to hear about it; it just happens to be where Toma was taken off a train heading for Siberia when he suffered a major breakdown. He wasn’t in Kotelnich as a criminal or political prisoner, he was just there. Why wasn’t he sent on to the gulag or home to Hungary? Because no one could communicate with him: He spoke no Russian and no one in Kotelnich spoke Hungarian. He was 22, and was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.

In 10 pages, Carrère describes Toma’s homecoming to the place where he was born — the reunion of this bewildered old man with his brother, his sister, a woman he had once kissed and who had never forgotten him. He can barely speak — he’s hardly spoken with anyone for half a century.

Carrère has no choice. He goes to Kotelnich in his need to know what happened to Andras Toma there. And he succeeds in finding out. No one is alive who remembers Toma when he arrived, but Carrère is allowed to study the file that the psychiatrists kept of their 50-odd years of biweekly observations:

“Jan. 15, 1947: The patient speaks neither Russian nor German. He is passive during examinations, he tries to explain something in Hungarian.

“Oct. 15, 1948: The patient has a sex drive. He laughs on his bed. He does not obey hospital rules. He flirts with Nurse Guilichina. Patient Boltus is jealous. He hit Toma.