Survive

“I’m under twenty-five and I am unable to envision the future. I’m not the only one."  Survive ​ presents a singular voice of the French ‘Bataclan Generation’—those most acutely conscious of the terrorist attacks in the mid-2010s—grappling with issues of memory or post-memory, trauma, and survivors’ dilemmas.   Finkelstein cuts across national and cultural contexts, from French to Argentinian and North American. This novel situates contemporary youth in a violence-saturated present with which they are all too familiar, yet from which many of them feel alienated in a plurality of difficult-to-define ways. Finkelstein touches on the challenge facing her to understand their own lives as uniquely meaningful in the face of unending mass suffering.  ​ Survive ​is concerned with the work of grieving for strangers—a grief which does not begin or end, but is rather a structural part of one’s being in the world. For Finkelstein, it is essential “[t]o abide. Deep inside what is dying, in the midst of the bullets going astray and the offenses accumulating, in the midst of the misunderstandings imposed on a face other than my own, on a body other than my own... to build a world that thinks, a world that gives, a world that beats—a living world.”