V13: Chronicle of a Trial
I shouldn’t have liked this book.
I am allergic to true crime, weary of trite chat about terrorism and disinterested in courtroom drama.
However, Sam Freedman put it in his top books of 2025. I’m trying to add some serendipity to my reading list. So I took a handful of recommendations and bought them without reading what they were or why he liked them.
So I’m not in home territory here, with a chronicle of a trial. I would have missed a great deal leaving this on the pile.
What do lives look like in the years after such an event? The loss of the dead. The struggles of the survivors? What does a day in court mean to those who remain? He writes:
They struggle, but against no-one. For themselves, with themselves, with others. This isn’t positive thinking double speak, it’s a truth they’ve paid dearly for the right to say.
What can you understand from this kind of inquisitorial trial? How close to the truth can you get? A survivor testifies:
I’ve tried to understand how young people could get it into their heads to shoot other young people like that. I don’t understand. Maybe there’s nothing to understand. By I’m happy they can be questioned, I’m happy this trial is taking place. I think that my generation and the one after us, have a tremendous need to believe in justice.
Who would defend people accused of these crimes?
He shows us those lawyers in all their young energy, defending not a cause of the defence, but a system of justice. He describes the mother of a child killed that day, who turns to the lawyers for the accused and says:
Do your job, do it well. I mean it.
The idealism of it, and the sometimes compromised reality.
Whose suffering counts in the wake or an event like this?
We hear survivors from from all sides, those who loved the dead, those who pretended a connection, those whose suffering was set aside as procedurally inconvenient. We hear of the parents of the accused - also with a claim to victimhood.
None are flat characters or simple answers. A man who writes a book in dialog with the father of his child’s killer. He believes in restorative justice. Another rages in anguish and rejects that such magnanimity is the moral standard. Who would we be?
Carrère describes, so beautifully, the most heartbreaking scenes. It moves you, opens you up. A lesser writer would have then used that opening to drive home the decisive message about terror, justice, or his politics. It’s to his credit that’s resisted.
Instead I think we get an opening. The beginning of a set of thoughts and questions, not the end of a conversation.
There is a moral backbone here that grounds the writing. An deeply humane and humanist one, that the author wrestles with instead of virtue signaling.
We are told of Baruch Spinoza saying:
Do not weep; Do not wax indignant. Understand
And we try, but also feel for those who weep and wax. We trouble over what we can and do understand.
We hear a testimony quoting Vladimir Jankélévitch
Love for the wicked, is not love for their wickedness - that would be a diabolical perversity - it is only love for the man himself. For the man who is most difficult to love
That is put to the test for the accused and those associated, as something difficult at times, easy at others. Not just a simple platitudes or brush for any moral stain.
This is a beautiful book, that I think sits poorly among other tales of court life, justice or terror. I’d put it amongst the best writers and chroniclers of an extreme of human experience.
I’m glad to have read it, happy also, not have given myself a chance to pass it over for something else.