V13. Written by Emmanuel Carrère. Translated by John Lambert. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. 320 pages. $29. Fern Press; £20
A convoy of three rental cars departed from Charleroi, Belgium, and entered France on their way to Paris. They took ten jihadists on board on a mission to spread fear throughout the French capital and capture the world’s attention. On Friday, November 13, 2015, they were heavily armed and wearing suicide jackets, killing 130 people at three locations in Paris: the Bataclan music venue, a nearby terrace cafe, and outside the Stade de France national stadium. Hundreds more were injured. This was the worst attack on mainland France since World War II.
Nine years later, the scars on the French capital are, in many ways, difficult to recognize. After months of darkness and fear, the City of Light was once again a place of careless revelry and simple pleasures. On a recent weekday evening on Boulevard Voltaire, young people were lining up for a concert at the Bataclan. The name is now lit up in electric blue. At La Belle Equipe, the cafe where 21 people were killed in the attack, a young couple was quietly drinking cocktails at a table on the sidewalk. No one flinched as police cars passed by, sirens blaring, which plagued the city that night.
But the trauma of November 13 persists: lives ended, families destroyed, spaces shrunk. In 2017, a survivor of the Bataclan massacre, who was admitted to a psychiatric ward at the time, took his own life. A recent follow-up survey of 502 survivors showed that respondents continued to suffer from problems such as anxiety, depression, and hypervigilance. In recent years, French writers and filmmakers have explored this fear and its legacy in works such as Un An, une Nuit and November. I’ve been trying to figure it out. ”) and “Revoir Paris” (“Memories of Paris”).
One of the new books is V13 (for Friday the 13th) by Emmanuel Carrere, a French author of novels and literary nonfiction. For nine months in 2021-2022, he sat on a bench in a courtroom built specifically for the trial of Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of a group of 19 killers involved in the attack. was. The case was the largest in French history, involving 2,400 plaintiffs, 350 lawyers, and 542 legal briefs. Testimony from survivors was heard at a rate of about 15 per day.
The resulting book is a strange but compelling mix of dramatic reconstruction, psychological reflection, and personal reflection. Carrere, known for his sometimes intrusive first-person narrative, can see fear in his eyes. A survivor of the Bataclan massacre, in which 90 people were killed at a rock concert, told the court: “I saw her cheek ripped off and hanging down the side of her face. I put my right hand in her mouth to keep her from suffocating and pulled out her teeth.” Another said of a body of flesh and blood. He said he crawled through the resulting “human mud” to safety.
Carrère points out that the perpetrators were not whimsical dropouts or welfare cases. Mr. Abdeslam drove one of the convoys, but although he did not activate the suicide belt himself, he passed the Technical Baccalaureate exam at the end of school. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who trained for jihad in the Syrian city of Raqqa and shot dead drinkers at a terrace cafe in Paris, comes from a wealthy family of shopkeepers in Belgium. Other terrorists were instead pot-smoking petty criminals and car dealers who had been radicalized by the Islamic State on the internet and in Syria.
Carrere has an eye for unexpected discomfort, including his own. Mr Abdeslam, once France’s most wanted man, remained silent, evasive and contradictory throughout much of the trial, giving the public a “tissue full of incoherence and improbability”. I handed it over. However, in the final days of the interrogation, the defendant “managed to impress us” and asked for forgiveness, sniffing back “convincing sobs”.
Ultimately, Carrère concludes that concerns about the defendant’s integrity are of little importance. Abdeslam’s state of mind is “a deep void shrouded in lies, and I am stunned and regret spending so much time thinking about it.”
The pursuit of justice was an entirely different matter. The court convicted Abdeslam of terrorism and sentenced him to life in prison without parole. This trial allowed suffering to be heard, shared, and recorded. And in time, Parisians returned to normal. It’s the same lively, cheerful city it was before, but for those who remember that terrifying night, it’s a different city forever.
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