Moving and masterful ... Magnificent ... I wept many times reading V13, for wildly different reasons. Sometimes I was touched ... Gutting ... Carrère commits everything to the page, omitting nothing, however unbearable.
Compelling answers ... 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.
Carrère’s sensitivity and eye for telling, pathetic detail are on display throughout this collection ... Carrère does not blur the boundaries of fact and fiction. But he does bring a novelistic technique to bear on his reporting ... Notable.
The reader feels that they really know everything about Carrère, even when they don’t want to ... Carrère’s icy, disclosing style is a marvel ... Marvellous and terrifying.
Carrère is clinically attuned to the spectacle of the courtroom ... The book loses steam in the final pages, when Carrère shifts his attention to the finer points of French jurisprudence.
Carrère’s account adds to the commemorative dimension of the trial, its elegant prose bringing back to life those who died, often through an unexpected detail. When it attends to the victims’ suffering, the strength and humanity Carrère brings out makes for a reading experience that is at once humbling and invigorating.
There are startling moments of human kindness and generosity...and Carrère is ever alive to striking details ... He cannot penetrate them, or the fatal decisions they made, to any real depth ... The problem is perhaps one of form: a weekly magazine column isn’t an ideal medium for deep insight, and even if these pieces have been edited, shaped and expanded for the book, this is still fundamentally a collection of reports.
