Emmanuel Carrère

Una mazzata. Carrere racconta il processo legato al venerdì 13 degli attentati a Parigi, e lo fa da inviato di giornale, riorganizzando i suoi appunti in tre parti: le vittime, gli imputati, la corte.
Le vittime è straziante, ma lo sguardo a volte cinico di Carrere riesce a far rimanere attaccati alla realtà. Racconta storie devastanti, ma lo fa con una lucidità che riesce a non scadere mai nel pietistico.
Per gli imputati, va oltre alle singole storie degli imputati, divagando anche show more sull'estremismo islamico e sulla radicalizzazione: una analisi non approfondita, ma interessante. Sulla corte, si perde un po' (ma gli si perdona, anche perché probabilmente è semplicemente una parte meno coinvolgente per chiunque). Si raccontano i giurati, le fasi finali del processo dove per sua stessa ammissione l'entusiasmo di perde.
Dopo questo, m'è tornata una gran voglia di leggerlo, peccato che mi sia rimasto poco e punto. show less

The trial for the surviving perpetrators of the attacks in Paris on November 12, 2015, which included the massacre at the Bataclan nightclub, took place over most of a year and Emmanuel Carrière covered it, attending every day and writing about what happened and the people also attending in a column that was published in four different papers in four European countries. Those columns have been reworked into this book.

It's gripping stuff. Carrière is curious about the lives of everyone show more involved, from the many surviving victims, families of the victims, to the men being charged. The length of the trial meant that he got to know many of the other attendees very well and he approaches the lives of everyone involved with the same care. The book is involving and a little claustrophobic, as it must have been for him, sitting every day in the same purpose-built room in the center of Paris. He struggles to understand the men charged, to understand what motivated them, finds himself sympathizing by a man caught up because he helped a friend, he visits a place a perpetrator hid out, and he talks about the experiences and aftermath of those whose lives were shattered in those moments.

This book is, of course, very hard to read at times, but it's also a remarkable document that constantly highlights the human lives affected. Carrière, like Janet Malcolm, writes well and has a genuine curiosity about human lives. show less

It is hard to know what to make of this fictionalized biography of Philip K. Dick. The New York Times said it gives us a “bubble gum” treatment of Dick’s fiction, and that’s about right, but it reads a bit like a Dick story, and suggests that Scanner Darkly may be about as autobiographical as anything Dick ever wrote. There are no notes and no sources, so who knows what you can believe. Which seems to have been Dick’s attitude about reality, so there you go. 3.5.

This little book is quite scary enough. Starting with the simple action (or is it?) of shaving a moustache, it takes us down an increasingly elaborate and ultimately grim rabbit hole of fate. The gruesome grandchild of Alice - how many impossible things can we believe before bedtime?