Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781609455569)

WINNER PRIX FEMINA AND PRIX DU ROMAN NEWS

A 2019 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (Evening Standard・New Statesman ・Lit Hub)

Paris, January 7, 2015. Two terrorists who claim allegiance to ISIS attack the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The event causes untold pain to the victims and their families, prompts a global solidarity movement, and ignites a fierce debate over press freedoms and the role of satire today.

Philippe Lan on, a journalist, author, and a weekly contributor to Charlie Hebdo is gravely wounded in the attack. This intense life experience upends his relationship to the world, to writing, to reading, to love and to friendship. As he attempts to reconstruct his life on the page, Lan on rereads Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and others in search of guidance. It is a year before he can return to writing, a year in which he learns to work through his experiences and their aftermath.

Disturbance is not an essay on terrorism nor is it a witness's account of Charlie Hebdo. The attack and what followed are part of Lan on's narrative, which, instead, touches upon the universal. It is an honest, intimate account of a man seeking to put his life back together after it has been torn apart.

Disturbance is a book about survival, resilience, and reconstruction, about transformation, about one man's shifting relationship to time, to writing and journalism, to truth, and to his own body.

Author: Philippe Lan輟n
ISBN-10: 1609455568
ISBN-13: 9781609455569
Publisher: Europa Editions
Language: English
Published: 11/12/2019
Pages: 448
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.60w x 1.90d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2019 pg. 83
Publishers Weekly 08/26/2019
Library Journal 11/01/2019 pg. 91
Foreword 10/26/2019