V13
Chronicle of a Trial
by Emmanuel Carrère
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Pub Date Nov 19 2024 | Archive Date Dec 19 2024
Description
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.
A Note From the Publisher
John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov, The Kingdom, and 97,196 Words. He lives in South Korea.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374615703 |
| PRICE | $29.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 320 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
R V, Reviewer
Emmanuel Carrère is one of my favourite writers and in V13 he returns to what he - in my opinion - does best: a mix of reportage, law and memoir that is humane, accessible and chilling at the same time.
V13 is the term the French use to refer to the horrific terrorist attacks of Friday 13 November 2015 in Paris (Bataclan, terraces, Stade de France) in which 130 people lost their lives.
In 2021, the 'trial of the century' started and Carrère followed it intensively, attending the court hearings almost daily for a year.
The book follows the chronological set-up of the trial, starting from the victims and their harrowing testimonies.
Next are the perpetrators, Salah Abdeslam being the only surviving member of the suicide commando, but there are quite a few aides in the box too and their guilt is not always clear. Here the facts of the case are presented, the preparation, but also their personalities and their defense strategies. The third and final part of about the organisation of the court and the French criminal system and how it comes to a judgment.
The book makes an impression, because of its subject matter. But Carrère also manages to find little interesting details, he is touched, he doubts he suffers and the reader with him. I couldn't put it away.
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