Used book – À son image, Jérôme Ferrari

On an August evening, Antonia, strolling along the port of Calvi after a Saturday spent immortalizing a wedding's festivities through her camera lens, encounters a group of legionnaires, among whom she recognizes Dragan, whom she had met during the war in ex-Yugoslavia. After hours of ardent conversation, the young woman, though exhausted, decides to head to the south of the island, where she lives. A swerve sends her car plunging into a ravine: she is killed instantly.

The deceased's funeral service will be conducted by a priest who is none other than her uncle and godfather. To ward off his immense sorrow, he has vowed to strictly adhere to the rules set forth by the liturgy. But, in the sweltering heat of the small church, images surge from every memory, reconstructing the trajectory of the teenager who dreamed of becoming a photographer, of the young woman who, in the mid-1980s, threw herself into the arms of an overly charming nationalist militant before resigning herself to working for a local daily where "photojournalism" seemed to serve no other purpose than to perpetuate an island community battered by bloody struggles between nationalist clans.

Weary of this life, Antonia, succumbing to the temptation to invent a calling for herself, decides, in 1991, to leave for ex-Yugoslavia, drawn, like so many before her, into the magnetic field of war, that unrepresentable.

From the failure of the individual to the painful examination of the aporias of all representation, Jérôme Ferrari explores, with this profoundly human novel, the ambiguous links between image, photography, reality, and death.