La Chair des autres ("The Flesh of Others", untranslated) by Claire Berest, Albin Michel, 212 pages, €18.90, digital €15.

Ecrire Mazan. une affaire, mille façons de l'écrire ("Writing Mazan: One Case, a Thousand Ways to Write it", untranslated) by Elise Costa, Marchialy, 350 pages, €22, digital €15.

Between September and December 2024, novelist Claire Berest and journalist Elise Costa covered the Mazan rape trial – Berest for Paris Match, Costa for Slate.fr – and now deliver two dense and elegant accounts. Although other books have appeared since the verdict, the works of Berest and Costa stand apart. They raise the question of narrative and its stakes – the "why" for Berest and the "how" for Costa – within the context of a historically significant event.

Following in the footsteps of Emmanuel Carrère's renowned nonfiction novel L'Adversaire (The adversary, 2000), Berest explores the origins of violence, perversion, and evil in La Chair des autres ("The Flesh of Others," untranslated). She also delves into her own motivations, probing the reasons that drive one to write about such subjects, even if they are contradictory, selfish, or insidious. Drawn to this extraordinary case, with its 51 defendants and thousands of rape videos that immediately place it in "an entirely different dimension of crime reporting," the novelist attempts to go beyond the common fascination with true crime, beginning with her own.

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