The Brooklyn Rail

Towards the end of the criminal trial of the November 13, 2015 (V13) Paris terror attacks, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère turned to defense attorney Xavier Nogueras and, over a glass of wine, raised “the eternal question.” “Where,” Carrère asked the controversial lawyer, who specializes in defending jihadism, “do you draw the line? Are there any causes you’d refuse to defend?” Nogueras sipped from his glass, then turned the question on its head. “There’s no cause that I defend, but there’s no accused that I’ll refuse.” He will never defend terrorism, he explained, but he will always defend terrorists. His job, he went on, comes in at the very end, “when everyone else has turned their backs, to be the last to reach out a hand.”

Nogueras’s image is striking on its face, but it carries an especially provocative chiasmus in the context of the V13 attacks. Survivors of the mass shooting in the Bataclan concert hall invariably refer to the mad scramble for the exits when terrorists opened fire, to the tangled morass of bloodstained bodies beneath their feet, and—in brief glimpses of humanity—to the occasional hand reached out, and sometimes held, during the worst moment of their lives.

They were some of the luckier ones. On the terraces of small bars in the 10th and 11th arrondissements, dozens of young Parisians were murdered instantly by machine gun fire. Some 130 people were killed, and more than four hundred injured, across the coordinated attacks, which shocked France and Europe as a whole. For many, what was particularly chilling—and particularly incomprehensible—was the youth of both the victims (concertgoers, café dwellers) and the perpetrators (almost exclusively men in their twenties). “I tried to understand,” one survivor testified, “how young people could get it into their heads to shoot other young people like that.” Inside the Bataclan, one man dared to ask the unanswerable question. “Why,” he shouted aloud, “are you doing this?” He was executed, point blank, a moment later.

On his first day of reporting from the Palais de Justice in Paris, Emmanuel Carrère considered a more immediate why. Why sit through countless gory testimonies, hundreds of heart-wrenching accounts of grieving, and scores of chilling tales of radicalization? Why mortgage away, for the next nine months of daily trials, any hope of a life beyond the courtroom? “Why,” Carrère wondered, “inflict this on myself?”

There’s a passage in Yoga, Carrère’s 2020 account of his own psychiatric breakdown, which may offer a clue. Carrère tells a French pun: the Térieur family welcomes a pair of twin boys—their names will be Alan and Alex. Alan Térieur, à l’interieur (on the inside); Alex Térieur, à l’exterieur (on the outside). “With every book I write,” Carrère goes on, “there’s always a moment when I think it could be called The Brothers Térieur.” Carrère’s works are forever split between those two brothers, each vying for control of the text, a battle between a writer’s fervid interiority and his meticulous reporting of the outside world.

Yoga was all Alan’s terrain. But that book, observes Carrère’s editor at Le Nouvel Observateur (L’Obs) in the postscript to V13, “left [Carrère] somewhat out of sorts.” Yoga’s introspection was grueling: what began as an “upbeat, subtle little book on yoga” grew into a total excavation of the self, a meditation on illness, honesty, and a writer’s futile quest for experience unmediated by language. Carrère bared everything, and the result was a masterpiece. But perhaps it should come as no surprise that Carrère requested, not long after Yoga’s publication, a new assignment from L’Obs. “I would not be at all averse,” Carrère wrote to his editors, “to some reporting.” Alex Térieur longed for his return.

Carrère took on a ten-day assignment, and then his editors pitched a longer one. Would he have any interest, perhaps, in covering the trial of the twenty men accused of taking part in V13? He would; soon Carrère found himself inside the windowless courtroom hastily constructed for the case, which promised to be the longest, most complex trial in French history.

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When Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in 1961, the case, observed Hannah Arendt, “was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done.” Eichmann’s was a “show trial,” one whose aim was to educate and to edify, not to effect justice. It would be wrong to call the V13 trials a “show,” but it would be naïve to ignore the essential futility of a trial in which the core protagonists are already dead, and the accused are largely ne’er-do-well accomplices of often distant complicity. The V13 trial was built on what France had suffered, not on what these twenty men had done. Its essential purpose was to incur a reckoning, a remembrance, and a public airing of experience by those wounded, mourning, and otherwise touched by the attacks.

This behemoth trial, writes Carrère, held “the colossal ambition of seeking to unfold … from every angle, from the point of view of everyone involved, what happened that night.” What resulted was a tangled knot of oratory, memory, and interrogation, which proved itself, over those long nine months, decidedly literary in nature. The trial’s “unique experience of horror, pity, proximity, and presence” grew into a “collective narrative,” a tapestry of experience whose final texture was not unlike a novel—perhaps a “nonfiction novel,” as Carrère often describes his work. For someone like Carrère, “whose job it is to tell stories,” this paraliterary blend of language, narrative, and composition proved nothing short of intoxicating.

We are closer to the why; over the course of V13’s forty-two dispatches, Carrère offers a number of other compelling answers to that fickle question. Some involve understanding the process of radicalization, and reckoning with the asymmetrical value of life in Western warfare; others concern the gauche calculations of victim compensation, and the messy work of defending those who, as Nogueras knows, offend every inkling of decency with their actions. It helps that the defendants, for their part, cannily poke at their French audience’s myopia (“We weren’t born with Kalashnikovs,” one man sighs).

Why, for the writer, and why, for the reader, grow perfectly clear. At many moments in V13, the experience is that of watching a master magician, wondering how he might possibly pull off his next act. How, one wonders, will Carrère bring us through so much terror and suffering, make meaning out of misery, and wring coherence from the incomprehensible? In V13’s superb final third, Carrère deftly pulls the pieces together. His prose is poignant without pretension, and his wit makes him a wonderful companion—so much so that it’s hard, at times, not to long for a little more of Alan Térieur.

Like the trial it depicts, V13 is incredibly audacious in scope. But in this moving, provocative account, Carrère rises to his own challenge. Yet if there is one why which, through no fault of the author, remains forever out of reach, it is that very first, voiced in the last words of that young man in the Bataclan. It is why twenty-eight year-old Samy Amimour, the son of a loving French-Algerian father who dressed as Santa Claus at Christmastime, would join the Islamic State and blow himself up in a concert hall; it is why, by contrast, twenty-six year-old Salah Abdeslam would choose not, at the last possible minute, to detonate the bomb on his belt, and to instead walk from a packed Paris café with its patrons unscathed. Amimour is no longer here to answer, and Abdeslam, imprisoned for life, seems not to know himself. There are some questions which might possess us for a lifetime.