Published on October 5, 2024 at 4:56 p.m. / Modified on October 5, 2024 at 5:00 p.m.
Fearing strangers more than the plague, the fierce inhabitants of North Sentinel, an island in the Andamans in the Indian Ocean, riddle anyone who tries to land on its shore with arrows. It is to demonstrate the greatest wisdom, according to the narrator of Jérôme Ferrari’s new novel, North Sentinel: Tales of the Native and the Traveler. In this brief book, stretched like the string of a bow, which promises to be the first volume of a trilogy on otherness, the winner of the 2012 Goncourt Prize (Le Sermon on the fall of Rome) offers a reflection on the two scourges which torture a Corsica hated as much as loved, the culture of violence and mass tourism.
If we had the naivety to let the traveler leave alive, as the Sultan of Harar did with Captain Richard Francis Burton (who will be the central figure of the second volume of the triptych), we can only regret it bitterly. Yet we should know, the narrator angrily denounces: “The first traveler always brings with him innumerable calamities.”
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