Jérôme Ferrari, author of the “Sermon on the Fall of Rome,” for which he received the Goncourt Prize in 2012, of “Un dieu, un animal,” of “Le Principe,” or even of “A son image” (recently brought to the screen by Thierry de Peretti) signs a “Très brève théorie de l’Enfer.” This new novel, dense and dark, is part of the triptych of the “Tales of the native and the traveler,” which began in 2024 with “Nord Sentinelle,” in which the author dealt with the violent relationships between Corsican natives and tourists on the island.
In this new installment, Jérôme Ferrari continues his exploration of the notion of otherness by juxtaposing two types of exile: that of the narrator, a Frenchman expatriated in Abu Dhabi, and that of his housemaid, Kaveesha, a Sri Lankan immigrant. Trapped in the closed worlds created by these exploitative societies, they coexist but do not meet.
Fueled by stories of journeys of intrepid explorers propelled by the wind towards other hemispheres in his childhood, Jérôme Ferrari delivers with “Très brève théorie de l’Enfer” a very different vision of this quest for the Elsewhere. His narrator, a philosophy professor, driven by the “beautiful and senseless desire to become someone other than himself,” has expatriated to Abu Dhabi with his wife and child. Like many of Ferrari’s characters, he is caught in something that surpasses him, and will not emerge unscathed from what Ferrari calls a kind of “ethical labyrinth.” In his relationships with others, particularly with his housemaid Kaveesah, the narrator knows he cannot act rightly. “Thinking that everything is owed to us” and that it is perfectly normal for there to be people working for us is obviously unbearable, but accepting it while finding it wrong is also.
In relation to the chapters dedicated to the narrator’s expatriation experience, Jérôme Ferrari adopts the point of view of Kaveesah and recounts her own journey of exile from Sri Lanka to Abu Dhabi. While literary fiction is indeed “the place of the experience of otherness, as it consists of adopting perspectives that are not our own,” Ferrari reminds us that this experience is not a mystical power: “I do not think at all that through a kind of gift we can guess what happens to people whose conditions are precisely inconceivable to us.” The author went to meet people who agreed to tell him their story, which he made an effort to translate back. “The task we have as novelists is to try to do justice to what we have heard, and not to usurp the voices of the people.”
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