V13

Starred review from November 1, 2024
Reporting on the trial that followed the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, a leading French author contemplates moments of rupture and repair. Ten months long, the prosecution was the longest criminal proceeding in French history and among the most complex. Loosely tracking court proceedings, Carr�re (97,196 Words, 2019) begins by narrating the carnage--a "tangle" of bodies in the Bataclan theater, caf�-goers gunned down in the street--and the resultant trauma. One survivor, wracked by PTSD, hangs himself in hospital; another shows the court the suicide-vest shrapnel that nearly killed her. The story then pivots to the accused, idealistic and disaffected young men radicalized in service of the Islamic State. Fascinated by the question of what causes people to commit atrocities, the author traces their personal trajectories through prisons and training camps up to and after the night of Friday, November 13. The court's goal may be to "unfold . . . from every angle . . . what happened that night," but Carr�re's ambition seems broader, to write the collective narrative that will allow perspective and the possibility of healing. The result is an important act of witness, both to the pursuit of justice and to the losses the court proceedings were unable to rectify.

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Starred review from October 7, 2024
Carrère (The Adversary) delivers a clear-eyed and soul-searching portrait of the nine-month trial, beginning in 2021, of those accused of plotting or assisting in the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which killed more than 130 people. The narrative is sculpted and expanded from a series of weekly columns Carrère wrote for the magazine Le Nouvel Obs, and it begins with a harrowing recreation of the multipronged assault led by ISIS on November 13—the restaurant shootings in the 10th arrondissement, the hours-long slaughter at the Bataclan music venue, and the suicide bombing outside the Stade de France—via testimony from survivors. Carrère then turns to the 14 defendants, attempting to understand their culpability and motivations, especially those of Salah Abdeslam, who was ordered by his ISIS superiors to blow himself up during the attack, but either failed to do so or changed his mind. The mystery of Abdeslam’s conscience fuels much of the meditative narrative, but the book never favors a single perspective, effectively mirroring the spirit of justice in its willingness to weigh all sides. It’s an unforgettable journey through the abyss.

Starred review from
France's "trial of the century." On November 13, 2015, Islamic State terrorists killed 130 people and wounded nearly 500 others in shootings and suicide bombings across Paris. Nine of the militants were killed in the attacks on "V13"--Friday (vendredi) the 13th. The trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the attacks began in September 2021 and lasted nine months. There to write about it was journalist and novelist Carr�re, author of97,196 Words: Essays andThe Adversary: A True Story of a Monstrous Deception. Carr�re is no legal specialist, but he tells an engrossing story of justice� la fran�aise; the book originally appeared as columns in the French magazineL'Obs. Readers will quickly notice that French trials are different. Unlike America's "adversarial" legal system, the "inquisitorial" French system lacks dramatic courtroom confrontations. Instead, defense and prosecution, with the active participation of the judge, examine the facts of a case. Perhaps most startling, the crime's victims (and their lawyers) are present and participate. This allows Carr�re to describe--perhaps at more length than some readers would prefer--horrific experiences of those who were caught in the attacks or who discovered that someone they loved had been killed. Except for one defendant (whose explosive belt may have been defective), the others varied from jihadist fellow travelers to associates who may or may not have been entirely innocent. Readers learn details of how the attacks were planned (very sloppily), how they were carried out (with much confusion), and how the police reacted (with incompetence before the attacks and overreaction afterward). Mostly, Carr�re offers a penetrating account of how France dealt with a mass murder. The trial was grueling, but it was necessary. As public prosecutor Camille Hennetier says of the verdict in her closing remarks: "It will not heal the wounds, be they visible or invisible. It will not bring the dead back to life. But it can at least reassure the living that here law and justice have the last word." An invaluable look into another nation's response to terrorism.

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