Just like
Human things
, Interallié and Goncourt prize for high school students in 2019 recently adapted to the cinema by Yvan Attal, Karine Tuil's new novel is anchored in the world of justice:
The Decision
paints the portrait of an anti-terrorism investigating judge, Alma Revel, who faces a personal and professional crisis. A few months earlier, this mother of three cheated on her husband with the lawyer of a man suspected of having joined the Islamic State in Syria - a man she must question and decide whether or not to incarcerate … The fruit of enormous and fascinating investigative work, this highly topical book, which its author describes as a “reflection on human complexity, otherness, the idea that you never know who we have in front of us”, offers us the opportunity to question in our turn a writer who has never been afraid to embrace, with as much courage as talent, the major societal questions of our time.
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In video, "Human things", the trailer
Miss Figaro.
- How did you come to want to paint the portrait of an anti-terrorist investigating judge?
Karine Tuil.
- I started to take an interest in terrorist attacks in 2007, the year when a plan for an attack by a French jihadist was foiled.
I had attended the trial, wrote
The Invention of Our Lives
, part of which deals with this subject, and discovered that little was known about these men and women in the shadows who direct the investigations and question the accused.
It fascinated me, I met some and I wanted to tell the story of a woman, coordinator of the service, working with the eleven judges of the anti-terrorist investigation center.
To recount his intimate and professional conflicts and the difficulty of finding himself in a position where each decision-making can involve the security of the nation.
Would you say you wanted to paint a powerful woman, but from within?
Hence the use of the first person.
I usually use the indirect form, but there, it was impossible to tell this story without going into the deep intimacy of this judge, to address the doubts she faces daily without using the "I": "Is this decision that I am taking will not lead to an attack? Won't a private decision, like that of a divorce, weaken me to the point that I would no longer be able to do my job, where we are under pressure twenty-four hours a day? -four ?" I have tried to say from the inside what these judges cannot express publicly. Just as I tried to say how we approach this job, how we keep faith in humanity, how we manage to create a daily connection with those we interview.Judges are subject to professional secrecy and rarely mention their working conditions. The anti-terrorist gallery is a very closed and protected place, and that's also what interested me: to pierce this mystery, which echoes the mystery of the human soul.
My parents come from Tunisia, and they were happy to live in France, to have become French.
Were you also keen to show the different faces of this woman - the professional but also the wife, lover and mother?
I wanted to portray a woman approaching her fifties who is in the midst of a crisis. To her professional difficulties, which could be described as ethical and political, are added personal difficulties because she is also a woman, and the mother of three children, and she wants to succeed in her wife. The mixed couple that she forms with her husband, a Jewish writer on the decline, explodes, and we learn that she has an affair with a lawyer who defends a jihadist whom she must question. The conflict of interest is obvious, and we see her torn in her private life as in her professional life. There is no literature without conflict, and I wanted to transcribe the dilemmas of a woman in a position of power, with this question that runs through the whole novel:can I trust anyone, including a jihadist I am interviewing who tells me he has repented?
The Decision
is a reflection on the safe zone in one's life.
How far can we get out of it without being destabilized?
The Decision
paints the portrait of an anti-terrorism investigating judge, Alma Revel, who faces a personal and professional crisis.
Press office
We find a recurring theme in your work: violence…
The narrator comes to be contaminated by social violence. We feel the tension in his couple, the tension in his professional daily life, the violence that innervates each of the interrogations. She works with young people aged 16-17 who hate France, and she tries to understand the process that led to this hatred. She makes sociological attempts at approach and notes a common point: the lack of hope… The judges give food for thought on the functioning of our societies. What shortcomings, what errors, have led these young people to such hatred of their country? This interested me all the more since I am the daughter of immigrants and I was brought up to adore France. My parents come from Tunisia, and they were happy to live in France, to have become French.It was a real question during the writing of this book. What has changed so that young people of the new generation no longer want to be French?
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Is that why you have integrated a second narrative thread where we follow the interrogation of a jihadist?
I wanted us to discover the interiority of this woman, but I also wanted to work on the question of evil, acting out and the possibility of redemption during a lifetime.
I wanted us to discover in an unprecedented way - via an interrogation led by the judge - the intimate journey of a young man returning from Syria, who was enlisted by Islamist ideologues.
The book is a reflection on the death drive present in each of us, but also on the truth that everyone believes they hold.
The jihadists think they are right.
Judges must work for the manifestation of the truth - it is their function.
But what is the truth?
And what truth are we talking about?
Intimate truth, political truth,
The Decision
, by Karine Tuil, Éditions Gallimard, 304p., €20.
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