Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo

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

Philippe Lançon, a journalist, author, and a weekly contributor to Charlie Hedbo is gravely wounded in the attack, but he survives.

This intense life experience upends Lançon's relationship to the world, to writing, to reading, to love and to friendship. As he attempts to reconstruct his life on the page, Lançon rereads Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and others in search of guidance. It takes him a year before he can return to writing, 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 make up a part of Lançon's narrative, which, instead, seeks to provide the most honest and intimate reproduction possible of the lived experience of a man who was a victim of terrorism.

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