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V13: Chronicle of a Trial
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About This Book
A moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France's leading nonfiction writer. Nearly every day for ten months, from September 2021 to June 2022, life on the Île de la Cité in central Paris came to a standstill. The most expensive and complex trial in French history—featuring twenty men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan and other sites across Paris—was underway. More than three hundred lawyers represented thousands of victims and the accused, all of whom were given the chance to testify. The case ran to more than a million pages. And, nearly every day for ten months, Emmanuel Carrère showed his press pass, walked through a metal detector, and took a seat in a windowless courtroom to bear witness. V13 isn't so much the story of a trial but of the community that formed around it—a city within the city, home to the innocent and the accused, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carrère introduces us to lawyers, survivors, family members, and above all the defendants, assembling in painstaking detail a human portrait of the crime. What emerges from these pages is a study of good and evil—and a philosophical journey through the borderlands between the two. Not since Eichmann in Jerusalem has there been a book of this scope and ambition.
Reviews
"Clear-eyed and soul-searching ..."
"Sometimes I was touched ..."
"V13's greatest strength, amid the cold workings of justice, appears in moments like this: it's a reminder of humanity, and its frailty."
"A hopeful book, but not in any grand sense of good trouncing evil."
"Carrère's icy, disclosing style is a marvel ..."
"Carrère's account adds to the commemorative dimension of the trial, its elegant prose bringing back to life those who died, often through an unexpected detail."
"There are startling moments of human kindness and generosity...and Carrère is ever alive to striking details ..."
"These characters are good copy, and something more than that, because we have also read Carrère's diaristic asides about how the plaintiffs' horrific ordeals have started to sound repetitive, his meta-commentary about the international press rushing in for the highlights, or the inside jokes among the trial aficionados ..."
"A brutal, beautiful work, especially adept at raising hard questions."
"Carrère does not blur the boundaries of fact and fiction."
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