The publication of a book by Jérôme Ferrari is always good news. Especially since the winner of the 2012 Prix Goncourt for The Sermon on the Fall of Rome publishes sparingly. While Thierry de Peretti’s adaptation ofIn his image (2018), the author surprises with a Corsican tragicomedy that explores toxic masculinity against a backdrop of the ravages caused by unbridled tourism.
Alexandre Romani, 23, stabbed Alban Genevey, a Parisian medical student he had known since childhood and whose parents own a second home purchased from the Romani family, four times. His crime? Smuggling a bottle of wine into the restaurant managed by Alexandre on the grounds that he charged prohibitive prices.
Insularity taken to the extreme
The narrator is the cousin of Catalina, Alexandre’s mother, a high school teacher who has relocated to Corsica after spending ten years abroad. In love with his cousin, he ruminates on his disappointment in a stream of consciousness written in italics, a tragic underground voice that both complements and contradicts the main narrative.
Like the inhabitants of North Sentinel, an island in the Indian Ocean defended by warriors who forbid access, the narrator dreams of an insularity pushed to the extreme. Nostalgic for a time he did not know, before the hordes of Barbarians in flip-flops came to pollute the beaches of his island, he rages against his compatriots who, long ago, opened Pandora’s box.
From a banal story of settling scores between natives and holidaymakers from the continent, Jérôme Ferrari goes back to the sources of a violence transmitted from father to son. The caustic narrator unrolls the litany of the misdeeds of the Romani family: Pierre-Marie, an operetta bandit who died in 1932 with his skull smashed by the young girl he had raped; César, the lazy heir who dismembered the family estate; Philippe, the thick brute; and Alexandre, the imbecile supermarket robber.
In counterpoint, the testimony of Shirin, the victim’s girlfriend, will reveal Alban’s class contempt and the disgust he inspires in her. This fable in which the “very powerful Djinn” and the witches pull the threads of the tragedy is the first part of a triptych on tourism, exploration and expatriation. The second will be devoted to Richard Francis Burton, the first foreigner to have, in 1855, penetrated the untouched city of Harar (today in Ethiopia).
North sentinel, by Jérôme Ferrari, Actes Sud, 144 pages, 17.80 euros
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