On an evening in August, Antonia, strolling on the port of Calvi after a Saturday to immortalize the festivities of a wedding under the lens of her camera, meets a group of legionaries among whom she recognizes Dragan, formerly met during the war in former Yugoslavia. After hours of fiery conversation, the young woman, although exhausted, decides to reach the south of the island, where she lives. A lurch rushes her car into a ravine: she is killed instantly. The funeral service of the deceased will be celebrated by a priest who is none other than his uncle and godfather, who, to make up for his infinite sadness, has promised to adhere strictly to the rules enacted by the liturgy. But, in the furnace of the little church, the images break out of all memories, reconstructing the trajectory of the girl who dreamed of being a photographer, of the girl who, in the mid-1980s, threw herself into the arms of a too seductive nationalist activist before resolving to work for a local newspaper where the "photographic report" did not seem to obey other purposes than to perpetuate an insular community undermined by the bloody struggles between nationalist clans. It is tired of this life that Antonia, succumbing to the temptation to invent a vocation, decides, in 1991, to leave for the former Yugoslavia, attracted, like so many others before her, in the magnetic field of the war, this irrepresentable. From the failure of the individual to the painful examination of the aporias of all representations, Jérôme Ferrari explores, with this astonishing novel of humanity, the ambiguous links that image, photography, reality and death maintain.--Actes Sud.
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