In His Own Image
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From Goncourt Prize-winning author Jérôme Ferrari, a bewitching story of passion, death, and love, and a powerful reflection on the ambiguous relationship between art and reality
Born in a small town in Corsican countryside, Antonia grows up in a place of deeply-rooted traditions and strong family ties. When she’s fourteen, her uncle, a priest, gives her a camera—suddenly changing the way she looks at the world and igniting a passion that will prompt her to become a photojournalist.
Over two decades later, Antonia is walking around the port of Calvi when she runs into Dragan, a soldier whom she had met when she was reporting on the war in the former Yugoslavia. The two spend the entire night in deep conversation, reminiscing about their experience of the conflict. Shortly after saying goodbye, as she drives home Antonia loses control of her car, plunges off a cliff and is killed instantly. Tasked with officiating his niece’s funeral, Antonia’s uncle is forced to reflect on her life and legacy, and on the profound questions they beg about ambition and doubt, passion and guilt, representation and reality.
Wide in scope but rich in detail, restrained yet deeply moving, In His Own Image masterly weaves together the story of an individual life with universal themes that resonate across time and space.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prix Goncourt winner Ferrari (The Principle) returns with the discursive story of a dead photojournalist. In 2003, Antonia is photographing a wedding in Corsica when she runs into a Serbian soldier she knew 10 years earlier during the Bosnian War. They talk to each other all night, and early the next morning she accidentally drives her car off a cliff. During her funeral mass, reluctantly led by an unnamed priest who is also her uncle and godfather, Ferrari parcels out Antonia's life. She gets her first camera, from the uncle, at age 14 and later embarks on a journalism career largely focused on Corsican militants, one of whom she dates off and on between his prison stints. The priest's inner monologue turns the mass into a self-pitying recollection of his battles with his faith and his illogical belief that he is responsible for Antonia's death because he gave her a camera as a child. Chapters about early 20th-century photographers intrude on the narrative, sentences stretch on over pages, and not all the prose is particularly insightful ("Staring at her television, because the past is always more legible than the present," begins a description of Antonia). It's an intriguing story, but it's undone by misfiring flourishes.
