AGI – Emmanuel Carrére returns to the bookstore ‘V13’ the process report cit took place in Paris and saw the accomplices and the only terrorist who survived the Islamist attacks of November 13, 2015, a Friday the 13th, in the dock, which shocked not only France but the entire West.
A total of 130 casualties killed under the local Bataclan, where the concert of the American band Eagles of Death Metal took place, locations in front of the Stade de France, where the France-Germany friendly match took place, and in various Parisian bistros. It’s not the first time that Carrére has decided to follow a court case to investigate the mind of the perpetrator of a crime.
© AGF
Bataclan
He already had that for the hit novel “The Adversary” published in 2000 where the French writer narrated he dramatized by Jean-Claude Romand, a man of a mild life who, for no apparent reason, killed his wife and daughters, both of his parents, on January 9, 1993, and then tried unsuccessfully to take his own life. It was later revealed that Romand committed the massacre because throughout his life he had lied to his family by posing as a doctor and saying every morning that he was going to work while spending the days on foot and telling them rather not the truth had preferred to erase them.
This time Carrére decided to do it a first-person journey into the horrors of fanaticism which disturbed the peace of the French capital. ‘V13’, published in Italy by Adelphi (La serie dei casi 147, page 267 – Euro 20), consists of a series of articles, revised and expanded, written by Carrére while attending the hearings before the Paris Assizes the weekly appeared in various European newspapers.
It is a shocking court chronicle that runs from “V13” which runs through the testimonies of those who witnessed the slaughter, the victims’ families, to that of the sole assailant of 10 of the surviving commando, Salah Abdeslam. The hearings took place for nine months in the building on the Ile de la Cité in Paris, where a kind of “box” was set up, the author calls it a “box”, which was set up in the atrium and could seat 600 people. 45 meters long and 15 meters wide, without windows and cost 7 million euros.
The chronicle of the attacks is bloody and leaves no room for the imagination. Then there are the disturbing stories of survivors who are forced to live in fear for years to come, with post-traumatic stress likely to last a lifetime. It is clear that the terrorist target in the heart of Europe was precisely to hit the places of youth, places of entertainment such as rock concerts, football matches and clubs and pubs.
However, the chronicle of the Carrére hearings is a succession of questions that the author asks himself, but which remain relentlessly unanswered just as it is almost impossible to penetrate the minds of those who have chosen to walk the path of fundamentalism. One is speechless when one reads the everyday life of the terrorist squad boys in the days before the attacks: games on the Playstation, car rides, chats with friends.
Just as Carrére listens speechlessly to the shocking testimony of the only surviving bomber who did not blow himself up: Salah Abdeslam’s testimony ends by addressing the numerous witnesses he heard during the trial: “I know not whether the victims hold a grudge against me. But I tell them: don’t let the resentment suffocate you. There is a lot of darkness in this story, but light also shines through. It may be inappropriate to say this in front of the victims, but that’s what I felt listening to some of them. They came out of this ordeal stronger, they became better people, with qualities you don’t find in the supermarket.”
Carrére, to Rome, presents his book on March 27th in Milan at the Piccolo Teatro Strehler.
