The night before two terrorists entered the office of the French satirical publication Charlie Hedbo and killed 12 people, injuring 11 more, contributor Philippe Lançon attended a showing of Twelfth Night. He intended to write a review of the show the next day. He was preparing to fly across the ocean and take up a teaching post at Princeton. The trajectory of his life changed rapidly, however, when he found himself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and Lançon’s monumental memoir, Disturbance (Europa Editions, November 2019), is a close examination not of the politics around the attack itself — though this scene is one of the most distressing that I’ve read — but of what it means to survive the unimaginable, to be a ghost among the living whose sense of time, love, and self has been irreparably fractured, though not entirely lost.
