Emmanuel Carrère’s V13: Chronicle of a Trial is the first book I finished this year. Not a light read, not an oppressiv

Emmanuel Carrère’s V13: Chronicle of a Trial is the first book I finished this year. Not a light read, not an oppressive read either. Many years ago I read his book My Life as a Russian Novel: A Memoir. Judging from my 2011 Goodreads review I wasn’t greatly impressed. More recently I read Yoga, interesting again not compelling. His collection 97,196 Words: Essays however was compelling. V13 is in that vein.

I remember (who wouldn’t?) the horror I felt listening to the news from Paris in November 2015, the massacre at the Bataclan and the drive-by shootings of people sitting at on a terrace enjoying a fine evening with friends. Descriptions of how the killers walked around, laughing, taking their time, shooting one helpless person after another. By the time Carrère gets to the trial for these events in 2021 all the killers are dead. What remains is a miscellany of people who assisted the killers in one way or another, in a few cases without any idea of what they were doing. V13 is based on his weekly report for the journal L’Obs over the many months of the trial.

Early in the book one of the guys who was intended to be one of the killers but walked away at the last minute makes a statement. This trial, he says, is like reading the last page of a book: what you should do is read the book from the start. What he means is that an act of terrorism, the murder of innocents, can be traced back to state terrorism, the murder of innocents by Western military forces. It’s not a question of justification but the obvious, lethal logic of what at the beginning of this century was called blowback.

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

— Auden, “September 1, 1939”

It’s hard to disentangle the threads of geopolitics, sociology, insane evil, comprehensible revenge, moral equivalence, possible justice. Carrère’s reports illuminate the confusion by taking us inside the exceptional experience of the plaintiffs (those who survived the killings and those who lost loved ones to the killers) and also the those of the accused. Plus the achievements of the judge, the prosecutors and the defense. Humanity is, to a degree, restored. He’s also given American readers an impressive testimony to France’s legal system. I can’t imagine a trial of terrorists surviving this scrutiny in the United States. One name is sufficient to indict our system: Guantánamo.

A note for anyone considering this edition. Penguin Classics has an illustrious history; I’ve had a romance with their books since my teens and have piles of them stacked on a remote shelf. This copy was printed on demand, the cover lacks its usual luster and the print is almost hard to read. A sad sign of things to come? It’s going straight to the free library on the corner.