North Sentinel: Tales of the Native and the Traveler (1), Jérôme Ferrari

For a trivial incident involving a bottle illicitly brought into his restaurant, young Alexandre Romani stabs Alban Genevey amidst a crowd of tourists gathered in a Corsican port. Alban, a student whose parents own a second home on the island, has known his assailant since childhood.
From then on, the narrator, intimately connected to the Romani family, traces – like one would trace a river and its tributaries – the lives of the protagonists and outlines a dynasty of foolishness and mediocrity.
On a tragicomic tightrope, in a vibrant language with corrosive undertones, Jérôme Ferrari probes violence, captures the painful disappointment of being merely oneself, and inaugurates, with the theme of intensive tourism, a profound reflection on alterity. On what, from the very first step taken on the shore, corrupts the land and the hearts of men.