Disturbance
by Philippe Lançon (translation by Steven Rendall)
Europa Editions 480pp £14.99
The Week Bookshop £12.99
On the morning of 7 January 2015, the journalist Philippe Lançon faced a dilemma. Should he go straight in to Libération, the newspaper for which he was a long-standing cultural critic? Or should he first drop in at the editorial meeting of a struggling satirical weekly? “In the end, he decided to stop by at the weekly, which was called Charlie Hebdo,” said Andrew Anthony in The Observer. As the editors and contributors engaged in their usual “intellectual cutand-thrust” (including arguing over Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Submission, about an Islamist takeover of France), a pair of heavily armed militants, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, stormed the building, slaughtered 12 people and injured 11, before fleeing in a getaway car. Lançon had the lower third of his face blown off, leaving a “gaping hole” below his upper lip. So bad was his injury – which he says “turned me into a monster” – that the terrorists seem to have left him for dead.
Before the attack, Lançon had never written about himself in 30 years as a journalist, said David Sexton in the London Evening
Standard. Yet with this “engrossing”, “intimate” book, he has proved himself a highly capable memoirist. The first 100 pages are devoted to the attack itself; the remaining 400 concern Lançon’s year-long recovery in hospital, during which he underwent “numerous gruelling operations”, including having his face reconstructed; his fibula was removed and part of it grafted onto his jawbone. Such details are combined with a “no less affecting” account of his “rich cultural life”. Pascal, Baudelaire and Proust were his companions during his recovery; he would listen to Bach “even as he was operated upon”.
This “brutally factual” book caused a “sensation” in France, reviving memories of an acute national trauma, said Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in the FT. At times it left me with an “uneasy sense of voyeurism” – as when Lançon recalls the “open skull of his friend lying nearby” – but it’s still an astonishing tale of resilience and personal triumph. It’s a shame, though, that Lançon didn’t reflect more on the political fallout from the atrocity, said Andrew Anthony. While advocates of free speech were “galvanised”, others insinuated that by mocking Muslims, Charlie Hebdo “brought the attack on itself”. Rather than engage with such debates, Lançon is “more interested in his jaw”. This is understandable, but it’s still a “weakness” of this “rarefied” book that there is “little sense of a world beyond the whitewashed hospital rooms in which he’s treated”.