We stayed briefly, last November, in a beautiful flat in Ajaccio, Corsica. As the owner's father was showing us round, he pointed to some books by Jerome Ferrari: "A local author. Not bad." (That's probably high praise from a fellow-islander.)

I didn't have time to read any of them while I was there, but later I bought this one (published in 2018), on account of its twin connections with Corsica and the Balkans (where we'd been the previous year). Ferrari was born in Paris, but he is of Corsican descent, and has lived and worked for extended periods on the island. He knows it well.


Ajaccio. We weren't around for this, unfortunately...

Right at the beginning, I'll get out of the way the thing I hated about this novel, which was its PARAGRAPHING!!!!!! One paragraph goes on for 20 screens of my electronic version... Almost a whole chapter... And these gargantuan blocks often contain humongous sentences as well.

Some critics like this. Here's Jean-Pierre Castellani, for example: "In Chapter 6, Ferrari offers an extraordinary interior monologue by the priest... At this point, Ferrari's text reaches new heights of perfection and touches on its main subject: our relationship with death... The long sentences, as is often the case with Ferrari, blow thrilling life into this long soliloquy."

I REALLY don't concur. What do readers need? White space. Air. Time to breathe... You can pile ideas up without putting your reader through the literary equivalent of apnea diving...

The "Joycean sentences, some of epic length", obviously make it into Alison Anderson's 2022 English translation as well... I guess they'd have to.

But that's really my only criticism. Otherwise, I found Ferrari's novel both informative and thought-provoking. There's really much to like.



A brief comment on the title, and then we're off: The French original (A son image) literally means In His Image; the English translation has gone for In His Own Image, which is fair enough, as we eventually learn that the title refers to a verse in Genesis, generally rendered in English as: "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."

But before we know the derivation of the title, the French permits an ambivalence that we can't inject into the English, because "son" can mean his or her... The whole narrative revolves around a young woman called Antonia. It's no spoiler to say she dies. She doesn't even make it alive into the second chapter, having driven off one of Corsica's tricky mountain roads. The priest whose monologue I mentioned earlier is both her uncle and her godfather, and he is the one who is conducting her funeral. The book very much reflects her characteristics, and is shaped by her influence. It is, you could say, made in her image. Ghost-written, as it were... The book also reminds us of the injunction not to replace God with images. And though you feel for Antonia, whose untimely death is tragic, you do have the impression that her uncle almost idolizes her... So that's an interesting web you can weave around the French title, but not so much around the English one.


Terrible cover... Makes it look like a holiday romance...

The book's 12 chapters are organized around two themes.

1.

The first thematic strand follows the stages of the funeral mass. This allows Ferrari to explore important subjects against a backdrop filled with solemnity and pathos.

Death, of course, is the most significant of those subjects. Antonia was in her mid-thirties, her age making her exit all the more shocking. Her life, too, had been very much touched by death. As the de facto "wife" of Pascal B., who's part of a clandestine militant group fighting for Corsican autonomy, she has seen plenty of violence, both against the state, and between different branches of the militants. She eventually leaves Pascal, tired of waiting for him to emerge from prison after every conviction, and sickened by the all-engulfing waves of savagery. He, too, pulls away from the cause, and starts to run his own business. That doesn't stop him being gunned down, however. Antonia finds his body just minutes after the event.

But Antonia's experience runs deeper still. She has worked for many years as a photographer for a local news agency. Tired of the run-of-the-mill shots of local events (always wide-angle, never artistic), she has ambitions to make a more lasting mark, and goes off to photograph the conflict then raging in former Yugoslavia. Where, of course, she encounters more blood, more hatred, more slaughter. All these years later (it's now 2003), she still can't forget.

In fact, she's only just run into someone she knew from those days. He's Dragan, a conscript in what was originally the Yugoslav People's Army, who found himself in the middle of a civil war: "During the 18 months of his military service, Dragan D. was never sure whether he clearly understood the objectives of the war, whether official or hidden." But he soon became clear that it is going badly, very badly, and faster and faster, with the past contaminating the present at every turn. Antonia remembers leaving him, a broken man, on a bridge over the Danube, completely at sea in what is a new Serbia. When she bumps into him again in Calvi, he has joined the Foreign Legion, too disoriented after his war experience to do anything other than carry on in military service. He's off to Sarajevo (which means he will be serving in the international peacekeeping operations there).


This cover makes much more sense...

So Antonia's experience has been particularly stark. But in any case, as the priest reflects, there's no way we can ever come to terms with the universal reality of life leaving us... In the long monologue I mentioned, the priest (never named) is wrestling with the conundrum of the Lazarus story. Jesus resusciates Lazarus; he presumably knows he is going to do that. And yet when he arrives, he weeps. He sees the misery caused by death in that little family. And he weeps.

The priest has no illusions that Antonia was a good Christian. In fact, she hated God... He himself hadn't been able to offer her comfort, and on her return from Yugoslavia, she couldn't bear to be near him, seeing faith as a moral error, an infamy: "God made man in His own image and likeness, and the biblical reference made Antonia furious, oh, it's not beautiful, the image and likeness of God, and the model must be even worse, so he kept quiet about the references that came to mind, he wondered what she could have seen during her stays in the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia from which she ultimately brought back no photos." And yet he knows she has a good heart, a compassionate heart, and understands that sometimes grief leads to revolt.

As was the case with Jesus and Lazarus, he tells his congregation, we believe Antonia is with God, but we're crying just the same.


Calvi, where Antonia encounters Dragan again

The funeral also allows us some glimpses into the Corsican environment.

-- It's fearfully hot...

-- Antonia's mother is desperate for this priest to officiate, even though it's difficult for him because he knows the deceased. Otherwise, she says, they'll get "a Franciscan, a Belgian, a Mexican, a Laotian, or who knows what, doesn't matter in any case because no-one understands a word they're saying..."

-- And the mass is sung in Corsican polyphony, which must have been beautiful (though they do the whole thing, so it must also have been long...). Examples here and here.


Ajaccio again

2.

The novel's other organizing principle is photography. Each section carries a brief description of a photo (but not an actual image). The first section, for example, is headed: "On the way home, Vojvodina, 1992". This is the one she takes of Dragan on the bridge (but we don't understand that until much later). This is a fictitious photo. But some sections carry the labels of actual photos, for example: "Dying soldier with his doctor, Corfu, 1915".

Braided into the text are vignettes of two early war photographers: Gaston Cherau, who witnessed the Italian onslaught on Tripolitania in the early years of the 20th century; and Rista Marjanovic, the first Serbian photo-reporter, who followed the disastrous Serbian retreat to Corfu.

Their experiences and dilemmas contextualize Antonia's -- and those of everyone else who tries to capture the violence of war. They exemplify how photography moved inevitably from objects to people, and then to dead people, victims. They also encapsulate the difficulties of struggling against "silence and oblivion", and the difficulties of releasing yourself from what easily becomes an obsession.


"Rista M." (Ferrari never gives us family names, only initials)

It was the priest, Antonia's uncle, who presented her with her first camera. She was 14. She had become interested in family photographs, not because of the stories of their subjects, but because of "the existence of the trace itself: the light reflected by bodies that in the meantime had grown old or had long ago turned to dust had been captured and preserved through a process whose miraculous qualities could not be summed up by simple technical explanations".

From the beginning -- this, at least, is the thrust of the novel -- there has been an intimate link between photography and death. And this link makes the process different from more traditional forms of portraiture (I keep wondering if I agree with that, and I'm still not sure): "Photography says nothing of eternity; it revels in the ephemeral, attests to the irreversible, and relegates everything to nothingness. If it had existed at the time of Jesus, Christianity would not have developed or would have been, at best, only an atrocious religion of despair... If it had been possible for a photo to exist of the death of Christ, it would have shown nothing but a tortured body delivered over to eternal death. In photographs, even the living are transformed into corpses because every time the shutter is activated, death has already passed."

It's also Antonia's uncle who gets her the job with the agency. Because it's run-of-the-mill work, she continues to train her eye by taking photos on her own account. Snd she notices how her subjects often take on an air of tragedy which doesn't necessarily reflect the truth: "The problem was precisely that, the total absence of tragedy, and Antonia's photographs failed to convey it because they were far too heavy with a meaning that was, in fact, lacking."

She's also starting to feel implicated. When she takes photos of paramilitary activities, she can't help but recognize the childishness in all the clandestine trappings: "Every time she pressed the shutter, she validated this staging that had nothing to do with reality, but existed only in anticipation of its transformation into images. This did not seem honorable to her. Yet, on reflection, the overwhelming majority of photographers did not practise an honorable profession; rather, they lent importance to futile subjects, or worse still, they manufactured futility."



Yugoslavia brings her up against even greater challenges. She spots good subjects for photos, but can't always bring herself to take them; and she worries again about the distorting effects of lack of context. She and a colleague enter Vukovar, with Dragan. It's a pile of rubble, canvas, and dust. "Only death," proclaims a bit of graffiti on a lone remaining wall, and Antonia takes a photo. But she wonders about what she's doing: "She fears once more producing a misleading image, suggesting a depth that is saturated with a meaning that does not in fact exist."

Ticking along beneath the surface, meanwhile, is the fear that it's all a pointless exercise... On a reconnaissance patrol, they come across a dozen bodies. Pigs are moving from one to the other. She takes photos of the bodies, the pigs, the trails of blood in the snow. Dragan orders his men to shoot the pigs. She talks the next day to a correspondent for a French newspaper, telling him how shocking the pictures would be if they were published: "He tries to gently disabuse her. No photo nor article has so far provoked any shock, except perhaps the useless and fleeting shock that is horror or compassion. People don't want to see that stuff, and if they do, they then prefer to forget about it. It's not that they're mean, selfish, or indifferent. Or it's not only that, at least. But it's impossible to look at these things knowing that there's absolutely nothing you can do to change them. You have no right to expect that from them. The only thing they can do is look away. They become outraged. And then they look away."

So what's the point, she wonders. Someone has to do it, he replies. But that brings up another problem, she tells her godfather: They LIKE doing it. So does she... She starts to think it would have been infinitely preferable not to see these things, because now she can't turn away. But she doesn't tell her godfather anything, so she just says: "I know that certain things must remain hidden."

Some of the photos she has taken will indeed remain hidden because they look as though they come from a horror film... "Others are less explicit but just as obscene. They don’t show anything but what they suggest is very clear and, in a way, it’s even worse. All those precautions, the subtleties of framing, the consciousness of what’s off-screen, the repugnant modesty, the pleasure. There are so many ways to be obscene, she wrote to her godfather."

She won't develop the films from the former Yugoslavia. Any of them.



So now she aims to produce nothing but ephemeral images. She has become cynical: "There were basically only two categories of professional photographs, those that should never have existed, and those that deserved to disappear. So the existence of photography was obviously unjustifiable, but since Antonia had made it her profession, and didn't know how to do anything else, she had to dedicate herself to one of those two categories. She dedicated herself to the second, and accepted it, not in the way that you make a choice, but rather in the way that you bow down before the undisputed authority of a fact."

But it's not easy. In August 1993, there's a meeting of the National Liberation Front of Corsica in Corte. They claim responsibility for the assassination of a militant from the rival wing, carried out in the name of "legitimate preventive defence". Everyone applauds, attendees raising their hands in their enthusiasm. She compares those outstretched hands with other outstretched hands, stiffened by death and cold. She's appalled by the approval people show of killing, their adoration of assassins. She feels soiled by having been with them. It's from this point that she sees the future of her island with terror. From a place that applauds claims of assassinations, she feels, you can only expect the worst.

She does develop these photos. Innocent-seeming pictures of people applauding and smiling. She's the only one who sees how hideous they are. There's no getting round it: "Her photos always suffered either from an excess or a deficit of meaning."


Pascal Paoli, an early proponent of Corsican independence

For context we hear about a couple of other photographers from her era. There's Ron H.'s famous photograph of Arkan, a Serbian warlord. (There's more information on this figure here and here.) There's Kevin C.'s photograph of a child and a vulture, which won a Pulitzer Prize, but provoked polemic. The photographer ends up killing himself.

Eventually, Antonia moves from the news agency to become a wedding photographer; she meets Dragan again; and she dies.

It's bleak. There's a moment of comfort at the end, when the priest consoles Antonia's brother; there's the thought that at least Antonia did her utmost to do no harm; there's the question of whether her undeveloped photos will bear retrospective witness, as Gaston C.'s did... But there's not a lot of hope in the air.


Bastia, truncated solidarity...

***

In His Own Image won the sixth Le Monde literary prize, and garnered much praise. But there are a few ambivalent voices, and Stephanie de Saint Marc is largely unimpressed:

"Whether here or there, whether in Yugoslavia or in Corsica, the voyeurism of the photographic gaze is called into question, along with the evocation of the difficulty in determining the dividing line between an 'honest' image and an 'obscene' one. At various points in Antonia's journey, doubts are expressed about the value of photography, which is trapped in an impossible alternative between the insignificant and the unrepresentable. Each time, Antonia is left with the heavy burden of embodying and bringing to life the enigmas and unfathomable ambiguities of the medium. In the long run, these end up taking precedence over the story itself and, because they are more complex and more troubled than the situations in which they are staged, they end up stifling those situations."

Ferrari, argues this reviewer, actually has the same problem: "You keep thinking you hear the voice of Jerome Ferrari standing behind his characters' backs, prompting them to express his own abstract questioning. And that constant intrusion of the author and his concerns means that what Antonia experiences -- including her death and the failure of her life -- remains external to the reader... Ultimately, the novel gives the impression of stumbling into the same pitfalls that its heroine encounters during her practice of photography: A difficulty of expression. It seems afflicted by the same impossibility that affects most of the characters, who are locked in dead-end paths."

I think this is rather unfair. Certainly, this is a novel of ideas. But I found the characters real enough. I empathized with their helplessness, and found the flat trajectory of their lives uncomfortably plausible. Plus, there are no good answers to the problems Ferrari raises. Pretending there are -- pretending any of us can do better than stumble along, aware but helpless -- would make for something contrived and artificial, rather than what we've ended up with, which is sad but genuine.

This is us -- most of us, anyway. We bump along, never quite achieving our potential, never quite able to lay to rest whichever demons we've raised along our way. And then we die.



***

Marie Gue points out the resonances between this novel and Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, whose photograph-inspired homage to his late mother sparked a series of reflections on the nature of photography itself. He, too, underlines the link between photography and death: "By giving me the absolute past of the pose, the photograph tells me of death in the future. What PRICKS me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself, she is going to die: I shudder, like Winicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already taken place. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe" (this is Richard Howard's translation).

Barthes figures in the epigraph of Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss, which contains, like In His Own Image, elements of ekphrasis. Ek-what? Ekphrasis. It's a narrative mode in which the writer describes a visual work of art, effectively painting a word picture of a picture... I learnt this word a little while ago, forgot it completely, and spent a long time this morning trying to track it down.

So, for the record, Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red is an ekphrastic novel. And lots of other examples are listed here.

You wouldn't perhaps describe this novel as enjoyable, but it certainly offers much food for thought. And the excuse it offered to look through our Corsica photos -- ironically -- was an added bonus.