Anatomy of a terrorist attack

"Why inflict this on myself?" Emmanuel Carrère asks in the opening pages of his new book, as he stares down the 10 months he is about to spend in a 7,000-square-foot white plywood room, built to hold a crowd, in the lobby of the Palais de Justice in Paris.

- JENNIFER SZALAI

It was September 2021. A group of 20 men stood accused of being involved in the terrorist attacks across the city in November 2015, including the massacre at the Bataclan concert hall.

The title of Carrère's book, V13, stands for the day of the attacks: vendredi, or Friday, the 13th. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the carnage, but it wasn't as if this trial would offer Carrère a chance to see a high-ranking mastermind brought to justice: "Here the defendants are second stringers, since those who did the killing are dead."

To wonder aloud how something will affect him is a classic Carrèrian gambit: candid, tantalising, rhetorically risky, unapologetically self-involved. His insistent "I" is intimate, not imperial. In V13, the reader experiences the trial through his account, adapted from the 1,400-word columns he wrote each week for the French magazine L'Obs. A postscript by his editor conveys surprise that Carrère "could agree to spending months on end uncomfortably seated in a maximum-security courtroom listening to hearings that are as gruelling as they are endless."