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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
a quick, compelling read exploring racism and trauma in france.
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I was very intrigued by the idea behind this book, but having a 11 year old traverse the city at night high on red bull seemed to be very far fetched
‘Most injustices are irreversible, that’s why they’re so unbearable.’
A routine stop places a teenage boy at the mercy of a young cop. The cop is well-regarded despite a quick temper, the boy is known for causing trouble. The cop is white, the boy is not. The cop lives, the boy does not. This is a familiar story we see play out on the news all the time, and Nothing is Lost by Cloé Mehdi (translated from the French by Howard Curtis) takes us fifteen years beyond the protests in the wake of a boy, Saïd, being murdered at the hands of a police officer and a judge acquitting the officer. Despite society trying to move on and forget, the boy cannot, his family cannot, and perhaps we all should not. Nothing is Lost examines the long shock wave of repercussions, told in a direct noir-esque style from the perspective of 11-year old Mattia who has been placed in the care of young 20-something Ze after his father—a social worker close to Saïd—committed suicide in a mental hospital following the protests. Through a cast of empathic and struggling characters and a plot driven by a mystery of information withheld from our narrator, Mehdi delivers a moving look at mental health and a sharp condemnation of police brutality and the sociopolitical forces that enable it while examining how, for the lower classes and people of color, ‘justice’ is just a ‘word that no longer means anything if it ever did mean anything.’
‘When you murder our children with impunity you can’t expect there to be no repercussions.’
Mehdi has already made quite a name for herself in France within the noir genre. Nothing Is Lost came out in 2016 (the English translation was published by Europa in 2023) and was highly decorated with awards such as the Polar Student Prize, the Dora Suarez Prize, and the Mystère de la critique Prize among others. I must admit it took me a bit to get into the novel as it starts a bit slow and detached while you gather your bearings on who is who and why anything is happening. I almost abandoned it after setting it down for a few weeks but I am ever so glad I picked it back up because once the pieces start sliding into place this really picks up. As the story gathers velocity and tension, uncovering secrets and creating new ones as it goes, it begins to increase in scope and perspectives until you can feel the weight of the whole community navigating this perilous and politically charged situation.
‘I’m not here as a judge, or a juror, or a lawyer. I’m only a listener. A belated witness.’
The noir elements are quite engaging as well. Each character is rather hardened to their situation and while it is a rather bleak emotional landscape—be advised that along with the theme of police brutality and murder there is also frequent discussion of suicide, including an attempt by Mattia when he was 7—there is still a lot of heart. While we don’t have foggy alleyways and action glimpsed only in shadows, everything is still just out of focus behind a fog of disconnect as Mattia is often left out of the loop, knowing there is much more tying the incidents of being followed and the string of break-ins that seem much more like the handiwork of cops than burglars. ‘I’m like a detective in a book,’ Mattia thinks, ‘I’m trying to put all the clues together, but not everybody can do that, and I don’t understand what’s going on.’ While Mattia’s voice seems much older than an 11 year old, having it be from his perspective does allow the novel to be not only a critique of police and the judicial system but how systems from mental health, childcare and education are also failing marginalized and poor communities. ‘The discrepancy between real life and what they force you to listen to all day long in a stifling classroom grabs me by the throat as never before,’ Mattia thinks as checking academic boxes feels very backseat in his life compared to being tailed by potential gangsters and his caregiver’s suicide attempts. Why learn of wars in the past from a comfortable distance, he thinks when ‘they just have to go out on the streets’ to see one in real time.
‘Because we’re always alone and we might as well get used to it.’
What really makes this novel are the characters, whom you can’t help but growing quickly attached to despite their many flaws and sketchy pasts. There is Ze, Mattia’s caregiver, who reads much like a hero of a [a:Roberto Bolaño|72039|Roberto Bolaño|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1617204588p2/72039.jpg] novel being a nightwatchman and ‘who’s already killed once and who drowns himself in poetry to avoid thinking about it, the way others drown themselves in alcohol or heroin.’ But what is the truth behind the reason people call Ze a murderer, the incident that got him locked up in the psychiatric ward where he would meet Mattia’s father before his death? We also have his girlfriend Gabriella who has attempted suicide repeatedly and seems a frail rose withering a winter storm. Elsewhere we have Mattia’s sister, Gina, who has ‘inherited from my mother the art of keeping silent about important things, and from my father the art of escaping,’ and reappears at random when not off doing something that seems to be dangerous and driving the action from off-stage.
‘The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.’
-[a:Ta-Nehisi Coates|1214964|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1595285597p2/1214964.jpg]
The various character’s connections with the Saïd story, which is the center of gravity around which the elements of the novel spin in orbit, provide some interesting twists that only complicate matters. Saïd’s death is a tragedy, but also just one of many similar instances that get washed away by a judge (throughout the novel we hear several newscasts showing similar incidents are still occuring) and we wonder what is causing a renewed interest in his case with graffiti—‘Justice for Saïd’—appearing around town. Police brutality is a major issue that Mehdi hopes to draw attention to. On average each year ‘the police in France ’kill 15 to 20 people in a population of 70 million’ says [a:Sebastian Roché|575102|Sebastian Roché|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], author of the book [b:Police de proximité: Nos politiques de sécurité|1179052|Police de proximité Nos politiques de sécurité|Sebastian Roché|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1181675711l/1179052._SY75_.jpg|1166864], and a 2020 national report showed that young men of Arab and Black African background are 20 times more likely to be randomly stopped by the police than the rest of the population.
The 2016 death of Adama Traoré in police custody (same year this book was published) sparked protests and was revitalized during the summer of 2020 protests against police brutality that occurred globally. Others such as Amine Bentounsi, Remi Fraisse, Théo Luhaka, Cédric Chouviat were remembered as well as working-class victims of police brutality, most of whom are Black or Arab.
Image: Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality in Paris (top) and Washington DC (bottom) in June 2020
At the time I’m writing this, 363 people have been killed by the police in the United States (where I am) since the start of 2023. 2022 was the highest on record with 1,176 killed by cops (1,047 in 2021). Black people were 26% of those killed despite being 13% of the population. Most killings occur during a routine traffic stop or mental health check, with only a third of all US police killings being in response to a possible violent crime (most are unarmed) and an average of 250,000 people are injured during police interactions, with major cities paying out $millions in settlement fees over wrongful injuries a year. Even if someone runs or has a criminal past, it is not reason for a stop to become ‘be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner,’ as [a:Ta-Nehisi Coates|1214964|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1595285597p2/1214964.jpg] writes in his memoir [b:Between the World and Me|25147754|Between the World and Me|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1433799467l/25147754._SY75_.jpg|44848425]. ‘It’s funny, this tendency they have always to strike where they can kill by mistake,’ Mattia muses in the novel, and most often the offending officer is reinstated. All this to say it is necessary that books like Nothing is Lost exist to explore these issues through fiction that resonates so emotionally and puts the reader inside the tragedies.
‘Closing your eyes to what’s going on in the world doesn’t wipe it out.’
Something Mehdi does quite effectively is emphasize how these issues are systemic failures. We see how the lower classes are left behind, with gentrified neighborhood leaving many without a place to live, how schools aren’t properly funded to reach all students needs, how criminalization of poor or non-white youth creates a stigma of assumption of them as criminals and a pipeline towards prison without an adequate support network when they get out (an institutional failure that individual organizations are often left to try and assist piecework, with libraries such as my own taking on a lot of the effort to connect people with access to aid for housing and jobs). This was Mattia’s father’s job as a social worker, a job that took a heavy emotional toll on him. And as the novel progresses we must question if his paranoia was schizophrenia as people claimed or a misdiagnosis that directed attention away from the gaslighting done to him by the local police who might have actually been following him and bugging his home. The why is a big question the novel meanders towards. But also we see how the acquitals only embolden the police, with the killer cop here being
As [a:Sebastian Roché|575102|Sebastian Roché|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] says, ‘for them the problem doesn't even exist. So that's the heart of the problem. If we don't recognize that it's there, how can we make things better?’ This is a question the characters struggle with all novel long, with Gina being the only to offer any sort of idea that ‘the only solution is to burn it all down.’ One can only guess where this novel is headed with an aim like that.
Mehdi hits at the heart of the problem, and it is that these things happen and we are just expected to move on and consider it natural. That State violence is just something we should accept, even when the systems that are supposed to uphold society are faulty and create downward spirals that lead to this. That for many, there is no safety net, and ‘ if you let yourself be swallowed up by the world…if you slip’ not only will nobody catch you but people will contort themselves to convince the world you deserved it through articles written in passive voice and bad-faith rhetoric that upholds State violence and inequity of budgets at the cost of human lives.
‘Why should I be afraid of them, I’m afraid of people who kill, and around here the people who kill are cops.’
This also becomes a look at how communities who are left behind or ignored have nobody but themselves to save them and must come together. There are protests but, as Gina observes, ‘anyone would have thought it was a civil war, but it was merely one more confrontation on a relentless chessboard where there had been thousands of others.’ There is a particularly striking scene when in the midst of the chaos during a protest being broken up by police she sees it is all taking place in front of a perfume ad declaring the world a beautiful place. We can make it one, Mehdi seems to hint, but it will take communal action and a massive transformation to bring justice back to life. As [a:Maya Schenwar|7778617|Maya Schenwar|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1442495074p2/7778617.jpg] writes in [b:Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance|27131078|Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States|Maya Schenwar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447140495l/27131078._SX50_.jpg|47168952]:
This is a harrowing and gritty novel that forces us to look police brutality directly in the eye. At times it seems a bit much, especially as the extent of a cover-up seems excessive considering how often killings get brushed under the rug even in light of video evidence, but it makes for a tense and compelling read. This is a noir with social justice as the lifeblood keeping the story alive and the reader turning pages and Nothing Is Lost presents an important message we should not look away from.
3.75/5
‘The next time we see each other there’ll be bars between us, all because a fucking cop lost his cool one day, all because justice only applies to one side, all because they have their own criteria for determining who’s a monster and who isn’t, who’s a murderer and who’s made a forgivable error, to err is human, isn’t it, it is if you’re a cop, it isn’t if you’re a delinquent, so knowing all the facts, choose sides, my friend . . .’
A routine stop places a teenage boy at the mercy of a young cop. The cop is well-regarded despite a quick temper, the boy is known for causing trouble. The cop is white, the boy is not. The cop lives, the boy does not. This is a familiar story we see play out on the news all the time, and Nothing is Lost by Cloé Mehdi (translated from the French by Howard Curtis) takes us fifteen years beyond the protests in the wake of a boy, Saïd, being murdered at the hands of a police officer and a judge acquitting the officer. Despite society trying to move on and forget, the boy cannot, his family cannot, and perhaps we all should not. Nothing is Lost examines the long shock wave of repercussions, told in a direct noir-esque style from the perspective of 11-year old Mattia who has been placed in the care of young 20-something Ze after his father—a social worker close to Saïd—committed suicide in a mental hospital following the protests. Through a cast of empathic and struggling characters and a plot driven by a mystery of information withheld from our narrator, Mehdi delivers a moving look at mental health and a sharp condemnation of police brutality and the sociopolitical forces that enable it while examining how, for the lower classes and people of color, ‘justice’ is just a ‘word that no longer means anything if it ever did mean anything.’
‘When you murder our children with impunity you can’t expect there to be no repercussions.’
Mehdi has already made quite a name for herself in France within the noir genre. Nothing Is Lost came out in 2016 (the English translation was published by Europa in 2023) and was highly decorated with awards such as the Polar Student Prize, the Dora Suarez Prize, and the Mystère de la critique Prize among others. I must admit it took me a bit to get into the novel as it starts a bit slow and detached while you gather your bearings on who is who and why anything is happening. I almost abandoned it after setting it down for a few weeks but I am ever so glad I picked it back up because once the pieces start sliding into place this really picks up. As the story gathers velocity and tension, uncovering secrets and creating new ones as it goes, it begins to increase in scope and perspectives until you can feel the weight of the whole community navigating this perilous and politically charged situation.
‘I’m not here as a judge, or a juror, or a lawyer. I’m only a listener. A belated witness.’
The noir elements are quite engaging as well. Each character is rather hardened to their situation and while it is a rather bleak emotional landscape—be advised that along with the theme of police brutality and murder there is also frequent discussion of suicide, including an attempt by Mattia when he was 7—there is still a lot of heart. While we don’t have foggy alleyways and action glimpsed only in shadows, everything is still just out of focus behind a fog of disconnect as Mattia is often left out of the loop, knowing there is much more tying the incidents of being followed and the string of break-ins that seem much more like the handiwork of cops than burglars. ‘I’m like a detective in a book,’ Mattia thinks, ‘I’m trying to put all the clues together, but not everybody can do that, and I don’t understand what’s going on.’ While Mattia’s voice seems much older than an 11 year old, having it be from his perspective does allow the novel to be not only a critique of police and the judicial system but how systems from mental health, childcare and education are also failing marginalized and poor communities. ‘The discrepancy between real life and what they force you to listen to all day long in a stifling classroom grabs me by the throat as never before,’ Mattia thinks as checking academic boxes feels very backseat in his life compared to being tailed by potential gangsters and his caregiver’s suicide attempts. Why learn of wars in the past from a comfortable distance, he thinks when ‘they just have to go out on the streets’ to see one in real time.
‘Because we’re always alone and we might as well get used to it.’
What really makes this novel are the characters, whom you can’t help but growing quickly attached to despite their many flaws and sketchy pasts. There is Ze, Mattia’s caregiver, who reads much like a hero of a [a:Roberto Bolaño|72039|Roberto Bolaño|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1617204588p2/72039.jpg] novel being a nightwatchman and ‘who’s already killed once and who drowns himself in poetry to avoid thinking about it, the way others drown themselves in alcohol or heroin.’ But what is the truth behind the reason people call Ze a murderer, the incident that got him locked up in the psychiatric ward where he would meet Mattia’s father before his death? We also have his girlfriend Gabriella who has attempted suicide repeatedly and seems a frail rose withering a winter storm. Elsewhere we have Mattia’s sister, Gina, who has ‘inherited from my mother the art of keeping silent about important things, and from my father the art of escaping,’ and reappears at random when not off doing something that seems to be dangerous and driving the action from off-stage.
‘The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.’
-[a:Ta-Nehisi Coates|1214964|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1595285597p2/1214964.jpg]
The various character’s connections with the Saïd story, which is the center of gravity around which the elements of the novel spin in orbit, provide some interesting twists that only complicate matters. Saïd’s death is a tragedy, but also just one of many similar instances that get washed away by a judge (throughout the novel we hear several newscasts showing similar incidents are still occuring) and we wonder what is causing a renewed interest in his case with graffiti—‘Justice for Saïd’—appearing around town. Police brutality is a major issue that Mehdi hopes to draw attention to. On average each year ‘the police in France ’kill 15 to 20 people in a population of 70 million’ says [a:Sebastian Roché|575102|Sebastian Roché|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], author of the book [b:Police de proximité: Nos politiques de sécurité|1179052|Police de proximité Nos politiques de sécurité|Sebastian Roché|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1181675711l/1179052._SY75_.jpg|1166864], and a 2020 national report showed that young men of Arab and Black African background are 20 times more likely to be randomly stopped by the police than the rest of the population.
The 2016 death of Adama Traoré in police custody (same year this book was published) sparked protests and was revitalized during the summer of 2020 protests against police brutality that occurred globally. Others such as Amine Bentounsi, Remi Fraisse, Théo Luhaka, Cédric Chouviat were remembered as well as working-class victims of police brutality, most of whom are Black or Arab.
Image: Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality in Paris (top) and Washington DC (bottom) in June 2020
At the time I’m writing this, 363 people have been killed by the police in the United States (where I am) since the start of 2023. 2022 was the highest on record with 1,176 killed by cops (1,047 in 2021). Black people were 26% of those killed despite being 13% of the population. Most killings occur during a routine traffic stop or mental health check, with only a third of all US police killings being in response to a possible violent crime (most are unarmed) and an average of 250,000 people are injured during police interactions, with major cities paying out $millions in settlement fees over wrongful injuries a year. Even if someone runs or has a criminal past, it is not reason for a stop to become ‘be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner,’ as [a:Ta-Nehisi Coates|1214964|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1595285597p2/1214964.jpg] writes in his memoir [b:Between the World and Me|25147754|Between the World and Me|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1433799467l/25147754._SY75_.jpg|44848425]. ‘It’s funny, this tendency they have always to strike where they can kill by mistake,’ Mattia muses in the novel, and most often the offending officer is reinstated. All this to say it is necessary that books like Nothing is Lost exist to explore these issues through fiction that resonates so emotionally and puts the reader inside the tragedies.
‘Closing your eyes to what’s going on in the world doesn’t wipe it out.’
Something Mehdi does quite effectively is emphasize how these issues are systemic failures. We see how the lower classes are left behind, with gentrified neighborhood leaving many without a place to live, how schools aren’t properly funded to reach all students needs, how criminalization of poor or non-white youth creates a stigma of assumption of them as criminals and a pipeline towards prison without an adequate support network when they get out (an institutional failure that individual organizations are often left to try and assist piecework, with libraries such as my own taking on a lot of the effort to connect people with access to aid for housing and jobs). This was Mattia’s father’s job as a social worker, a job that took a heavy emotional toll on him. And as the novel progresses we must question if his paranoia was schizophrenia as people claimed or a misdiagnosis that directed attention away from the gaslighting done to him by the local police who might have actually been following him and bugging his home. The why is a big question the novel meanders towards. But also we see how the acquitals only embolden the police, with the killer cop here being
‘welcomed so warmly at the station that he ended up telling himself it wasn’t so serious. And the law merely confirmed that feeling…He ended up convincing himself that it really was self-defense, that he’d had no choice.’
As [a:Sebastian Roché|575102|Sebastian Roché|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] says, ‘for them the problem doesn't even exist. So that's the heart of the problem. If we don't recognize that it's there, how can we make things better?’ This is a question the characters struggle with all novel long, with Gina being the only to offer any sort of idea that ‘the only solution is to burn it all down.’ One can only guess where this novel is headed with an aim like that.
‘the reason it’s come to this isn’t because a teenager was killed, or even because his murderer wasn’t punished. It’s because nobody spoke up. When a police officer is killed by a delinquent, he’s mourned, salutes are fired in his memory, he’s decorated, and even ministers file past his grave with tears in their eyes. When a delinquent is killed by a police officer, the silence is deafening.’
Mehdi hits at the heart of the problem, and it is that these things happen and we are just expected to move on and consider it natural. That State violence is just something we should accept, even when the systems that are supposed to uphold society are faulty and create downward spirals that lead to this. That for many, there is no safety net, and ‘ if you let yourself be swallowed up by the world…if you slip’ not only will nobody catch you but people will contort themselves to convince the world you deserved it through articles written in passive voice and bad-faith rhetoric that upholds State violence and inequity of budgets at the cost of human lives.
‘Why should I be afraid of them, I’m afraid of people who kill, and around here the people who kill are cops.’
This also becomes a look at how communities who are left behind or ignored have nobody but themselves to save them and must come together. There are protests but, as Gina observes, ‘anyone would have thought it was a civil war, but it was merely one more confrontation on a relentless chessboard where there had been thousands of others.’ There is a particularly striking scene when in the midst of the chaos during a protest being broken up by police she sees it is all taking place in front of a perfume ad declaring the world a beautiful place. We can make it one, Mehdi seems to hint, but it will take communal action and a massive transformation to bring justice back to life. As [a:Maya Schenwar|7778617|Maya Schenwar|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1442495074p2/7778617.jpg] writes in [b:Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance|27131078|Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States|Maya Schenwar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447140495l/27131078._SX50_.jpg|47168952]:
‘Our struggle for justice demands much more than any single indictment. It cannot be litigated, legislated or bought into existence. And there is no amount of money that could make up for the lives and human dignity lost to police and state violence against our communities. Instead, if we are to truly honor the magnitude of the injustice, we must commit ourselves to nothing less than the complete transformation of society.’
This is a harrowing and gritty novel that forces us to look police brutality directly in the eye. At times it seems a bit much, especially as the extent of a cover-up seems excessive considering how often killings get brushed under the rug even in light of video evidence, but it makes for a tense and compelling read. This is a noir with social justice as the lifeblood keeping the story alive and the reader turning pages and Nothing Is Lost presents an important message we should not look away from.
3.75/5
‘The next time we see each other there’ll be bars between us, all because a fucking cop lost his cool one day, all because justice only applies to one side, all because they have their own criteria for determining who’s a monster and who isn’t, who’s a murderer and who’s made a forgivable error, to err is human, isn’t it, it is if you’re a cop, it isn’t if you’re a delinquent, so knowing all the facts, choose sides, my friend . . .’
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content warnings for islamaphobia, police brutality, suicide ideation (among other difficult issues) -- but in many ways one of the main themes I picked up on in this book was the way we try not to talk about these things with kids (because we consider them difficult issues), and the ramifications when they directly affect a kid's life and circumstances.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Police brutality, Islamophobia, Suicide attempt
Minor: Self harm
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes