Content
Indigenous people and travelers: Dialectic of exile, guilt and metamorphosis
Combinations of the worlds are different in these countries, but they are still present before the jamais? Tout en haut, inaccessible dans sa splendeur, se trouve celui des émirs et des princesses ; all in bas, in the tréfonds d'un fer invisible [...] celui des ouvriers du bâtiment dont la sueur et le sang sont comme l'engrais nourricier où la ville insatiable puise l'énergie nécessaire à sa croissance frénétique.
How many worlds exist side by side in this country without ever meeting? At the very top, inaccessible in their splendor, are the emirs and princesses; at the very bottom, in the depths of an invisible hell […], are the construction workers, whose sweat and blood are like fertilizer from which the insatiable city draws the energy for its rapid growth.
With his new novel, Jérôme Ferrari emerges as a chronicler of metaphysical disillusionment in global modernity: In Très brève theory de l'enfer (2026, cited as TE) the title is a deconstructive program. The “theory” also proves to be “short” because the condition of the damned is defined by a fundamental lack of substance – where being tips into emptiness, no lengthy exegesis is needed.
The addresses to the "King of Time" ("Roi du Temps") form a solemn, almost ritualistic narrative framework in Jérôme Ferrari's novel, elevating the modern plot to a timeless, metaphysical dimension. Right at the beginning, the king is told that Hell is not reserved for murderers or blasphemers. Those who serve their "eternal sentence" there have exhausted divine mercy through their inner emptiness alone. These damned souls live in an "endless deception" ("mensonge sans fin"): they dwell in filth but believe themselves to be in magnificent palaces, mistaking their dirty rags for princely garments.
The narrator (a kind of Scheherazade figure, whereas usually the protagonist narrates) speaks to the king about the wisdom of the Almighty. As his breathing calms, she promises to entertain him until dawn—a moment that will "keep her alive once more." At the end of the novel, the narrator invites the king to gaze with her into the "vast subterranean abode of hell" to contemplate the fate of a single woman (Nardjess). Her face is petrified, and she remains "between knowledge and ignorance."
Mais dans la parodie de sommeil qui leur est accordée, au plus profond d'une nuit qu'ont désertée la lune et les étoiles, la nuit de l'enfer auprès de laquelle les ténèbres mêmes paraîtraient lumineuses, une angoisse mortelle les étreint comme s'ils sentaient confusion, pour un court instant de terreur, qu'ils sont prisonniers d'un mensonge sans fin et qu'ils ont déjà reçu leur châtiment. Au réveil, ils not se souviennent de rien: la révélation leur échappe comme le sable s'écoule entre les doigts. Et pourtant elle demeure, impossible à saisir et impossible à fuir. Elle is a poison, a venin insidieux qui se diffuse lentement dans leur âme vide et leur cœur sec, et vient ronger la racine des joies factices et des plaisirs corrompus. You can't wait to see what you want because you want to see the lucidity to get a chance of redemption - but you don't have to save yourself the money! Acun d'eux cependant n'exprime jamais ce desir: all, ils s'endurcissent dans leur aveuglement coupable, justifiant à chaque instant le jugement qui les a précipités pour toujours dans l'abîme.
But in the parody of sleep granted to them, deep in a night deserted by the moon and stars, the night of hell beside which even darkness seems bright, a deadly fear overcomes them, as if for a brief, terrifying moment they vaguely sense that they are prisoners of an endless lie and have already received their punishment. Upon awakening, they remember nothing: the revelation slips from them like sand through their fingers. And yet it persists, incomprehensible and inescapable. It is a poison, an insidious poison, slowly spreading through their empty souls and parched hearts, corroding the roots of artificial pleasures and corrupted delights. Perhaps it would be enough for one of these outcasts to sincerely strive for clarity to have a chance at salvation—but no one can know, for God is the Hidden One! None of them, however, ever expresses this wish: they all harden in their culpable blindness and justify at every moment the judgment that has plunged them into the abyss forever.
A key part of the theory is "culpable blindness." The damned receive a "parody of sleep" in which, for a brief moment of terror, they realize they are prisoners of a lie. But upon awakening, this revelation slips through their fingers like sand, and they remain trapped in their "factual pleasures." Another "torment of hell" is to deceive the damned into believing they can escape, only to then make the gruesome discovery that there is no way out of hell. Once someone has embarked on the "paths of hell or exile," there is no return.
The theory is introduced in the novel as a kind of metaphysical law that reflects the social conditions in Abu Dhabi: the stark divide between the glittering world of expatriates and the "invisible inferno" of the workers, as well as the moral indifference of the privileged, are thus interpreted as earthly manifestations of this "hell." The division of the narrative structure into a mythical frame narrator and a modern embedded narrator serves to cast the profane everyday reality of Abu Dhabi in a timeless, metaphysical light.
At the heart of the novel, however, is the first-person narrator of the embedded story, who attempts to escape his own identity through a metamorphosis in a foreign land. His voice demonstrates how he fails due to his own moral indifference and his inability to show genuine love to his wife Nardjess and his daughter Afsaneh. While the frame narrator declaims the universal laws of suffering, he provides the painfully concrete evidence.
The novel is after North Sentinel (2024, cited as NoS) the second volume of the still unfinished trilogy "Contes de l'indigène et du voyageur" (Tales of the Indigenous People and the Traveler). In Ferrari's trilogy, the roles of Indigenous people and travelers are problematized as a destructive cycle of mutual corruption and moral delusion. In NoS, the "first traveler" (such as Burton or Columbus) is defined as the bringer of countless "calamities," whose arrival irrevocably destroys the integrity of the Indigenous world. The modern travelers—the tourists—seek an "authenticity" that the Corsican locals (such as the Romani family) readily sell them, while simultaneously cultivating a "colossal sense of superiority" over them. In TE, the problem shifts to social segregation within the travelers themselves: The French expatriate (the narrator) flees his own indigenous Corsican heritage to live in Abu Dhabi in a "vacuum of the soul," while the immigrants (like the Sri Lankan Kaveesha) build the city in an "invisible hell" of sweat and blood. For the travelers, the locals (Emiratis) remain an "inaccessible world in all its splendor."
The novel portrays modernity as structural egoism: the hell of the present is not a place of punishment, but a state of ontological indifference in which empathy becomes impossible due to the total fixation on one's own "ego vacuum." The story demonstrates the failure of metamorphosis: the protagonist's attempt to become "other" through geographical escape is doomed to failure, since the subject carries the emptiness of his heart as an inescapable horizon. Spatial movement (Corsica – Algeria – Abu Dhabi) is an illusion of progress that merely masks the irreversible spiritual descent into the night, where any homecoming remains impossible.
TE fills the existential and geographical gap created in NoS by the mere mention of the narrator's ten-year absence. The failure of his personal metamorphosis in a foreign land and the resulting damnation are the central theme of the second volume, while the first volume focuses on the moral decay of his homeland. The protagonist and first-person narrator of TE is identical to the narrator of the first volume, NoS. In both books, Philippe Romani is the narrator's best friend. The narrator is also, in both works, Catalina's cousin and the teacher of his second cousin, Alexandre Romani, whom he teaches in the final year (Terminale). Both novels address the narrator's flight from Corsica, which he undertakes in response to the moral aridity and monotony of his homeland. Likewise, both volumes describe his return after ten years abroad (Algiers and Abu Dhabi), which was forced by the termination of his contracts.
The central act of violence from NoS—the stabbing of student Alban Genevey by Alexandre—is taken up in TE as a significant part of the narrator's traumatic memories. In the second volume, the narrator reflects on how he took Alexandre into his home on the night of the crime and heard his confession. In NoS, the narrator primarily acts as an observer of the conflict between "indigenous" people (Corsicans) and "travelers" (tourists) in his homeland. In TE, he himself assumes the role of a "traveler" (expatriate) in a foreign land.
A fitting conclusion to the trilogy in the forthcoming third volume could, for example, adopt the perspective of the disenfranchised traveler who, as a migrant worker, intrudes upon the supposed idyll of Corsica, thus completing the circle. While the narrator in Abu Dhabi observed the "invisible hell" of the construction workers from the privileged distance of his tenth-floor apartment, a third volume would radically reverse this perspective: A character like Kaveesha could come to the Corsican mountains to produce, under precarious conditions, the "authenticity" that is sold to tourists in North Carolina as folklore. This narrative approach would reveal the bitter truth that for those who have once embarked on the "path of exile or hell," there truly is "no return," and complete the motif of mutual corruption by showing that the narrator's own homeland has long since become a "supermarket of hell."
Alternatively, a sequel could be conceivable that portrays the narrator as utterly uprooted, becoming a shadow without a destination after the disappearance of Nardjess and Afsaneh. He would then be neither the "indigenous" nor the "expatriate," but a "double apostate" searching for the remnants of his existence in a world of "holograms and reflections." Such a conclusion would extend the "calamity" of the first traveler, described in the first part, to the entire modern world: the journey does not lead to salvation, but ends in total spiritual aridity and the "vacuum of the soul." The trilogy would thus find its end in the universal realization that in a globalized world, everyone is simultaneously an intruder and a displaced person, trapped in a "mensonge sans fin"—an endless deception. According to Ferrari, the third volume will be more historical in scope and will address colonial conquest. We shall see.
A comparison of the first two novels in the trilogy reveals that the relationship between Indigenous people and travelers is consistently characterized by a "face-to-face of mutual corruption," in which both sides expose their vices. While in *NoS*, violence is the central theme, portrayed as the archaic reaction of the Indigenous person to the insult inflicted by the traveler (the murder of Alban Genevey), the second volume explores moral indifference and "culpable blindness." The traveler in Abu Dhabi lives in a "continuous deception," ignoring the exploitation of others to maintain his own comfort, which Ferrari denounces as the very "assumption" of hell. In both works, the traveler's attempt at metamorphosis fails; he remains an "imposter" who must acknowledge that for those who choose the path of exile or hell, there is "no return" to a true homeland.
The protagonist in TE recounts his story in retrospect. He observes that now, "since it's all over," he has returned alone to his starting point in Corsica. The entire narrative is marked by a profound shame about his memories, which he reflects upon from the temporal distance of his homecoming. He describes himself as a "double apostate" and recounts how, upon his return, he sought out an old priest to confess. In TE, Ferrari transforms the Dantean inferno from a place of physical punishment into a state of ontological annihilation. The protagonist, a Corsican philosophy teacher at French high schools, adopts the Muslim name Abdelnour upon his marriage in Algeria.
His stopover in Algeria stemmed from his urgent need to escape his native island of Corsica and its perceived "monotony of existence," as well as its moral decay. He described his yearning for "elsewhere" as a "great wind" that carried him away. He chose Algiers because the French high school there had just reopened after the civil war; he hoped that the danger would deter potential competitors, making it easier for him to find a position abroad. Algeria became the site of his first moral experiment and an attempted metamorphosis, during which he met his wife, Nardjess. Ultimately, he fled Algeria for Abu Dhabi because, after a bombing, he wanted to use his French passport to escape the "long night" of violence.
But this escape from the self proves impossible. Ferrari uses the "Contes de l'indigène et du voyageur" as a structural framework to dissect the encounter between the Western expatriate and precarious otherness (such as the Sri Lankan domestic worker Kaveesha). The geographical movement merely masks an inner descent: the journey into the hypermodernity of the Emirates is inextricably linked to sinking into the "vacuité de l'âme" (emptiness of the soul).
Topography of Damnation
The work's philosophical premise is rooted in an introductory allegory that subverts traditional doctrines of sin. For Ferrari, damnation is not the result of singular transgressive acts, but a static state of being: the "sécheresse du cœur" (dryness of the heart). The damned consume their own ignorance; they inhabit a heap of rubble and imagine it as a palace, intoxicated by its stench as if by jasmine. This "eternity of lies" exhausts divine mercy more effectively than any crime, since the subject becomes the architect of their own prison. The paradox of artificial happiness is revealed in the discrepancy between the intoxicated existence of the day and the nightly "angoisse mortelle" (mortal anguish). This anguish is not a mere feeling, but the last remaining ontological trace of truth—a "poison" that corrodes the roots of corrupted joy. The inability to feel remorse cements the fall, as the will to clarity has been extinguished in the emptiness of the soul. This spiritual desolation inevitably manifests itself in the artificial topography of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Ferrari portrays the desert as a metaphysical force and a mythical construct, standing in sharp contrast to the artificial world of the Mussafah industrial zone. In TE, the desert is mythologized in two opposing ways: firstly, according to Wilfred Thesiger, as an ascetic myth. Ferrari refers to Thesiger's interpretation of the desert as a place of "heroic asceticism" and "supreme spiritual purity." For Thesiger, the desert was not a place of deprivation, but a "ferveur mystique" (mystical fervor) in which the absence of the superfluous allowed access to the essential. Here, the desert is understood as a "sovereignty" that compels humankind to humility.
For the narrator in the present, however, the desert is often merely a "décor délavé" (faded decoration), seemingly painted on a vast canvas. It is perceived as "indifferent and soulless," a colorless expanse that allows life only in an "exhausted form." Yet it remains a place of silence, where the dunes appear as if drawn by a "weary god."
The desert also puts up a “stubborn resistance” to urbanization. It is metaphorically portrayed as a force that whips up dust and sand to blur the contours of the artificial city, transforming it into a world of holograms and reflections. The Mussafah industrial zone is depicted as the dark mirror image of the glittering Corniche and as a modern-day purgatory, described as a world bathed in the “diffuse light of purgatory and bad dreams.” It is a place where the city’s waste is burned behind the dunes, guarded by a “ghost caravan” of uninterrupted truck convoys.
Arriving in the industrial zone of Mussafah, after you have passed the plus méridional des trois ponts surplombant the bras de mer qui separate l'île de la péninsule, on discover an other world that baigne la clarté diffuse des limbes et des mauvais rêves. Au loin, sur l'autoroute qui mène aux oasis et à la frontière saoudienne, a file interrompue de camions tremblant dans les vapeurs du mirage roule comme une caravane fantôme vers les incinérateurs où brûleront à l'abri des dunes les déchets sans cesse rejetés par la ville. At this time of the morning, the sole is a cessé de scintiller et son disque incandescent décline lentement vers l'horizon hérissé de grues en se découpant avec une netté irréelle sur la pâleur uniforme du ciel doré, comme dans un dessin d'enfant.
Upon reaching the industrial zone of Mussafah, after crossing the southernmost of the three bridges spanning the inlet that separates the island from the peninsula, one discovers another world, bathed in the diffuse light of purgatory and nightmares. In the distance, on the highway leading to the oases and the Saudi border, an unbroken line of trucks, shimmering in the mirage, rolls like a ghostly caravan to the incinerators, where the city's constant output of waste is burned under the cover of the dunes. By this time of afternoon, the sun has ceased to twinkle, its glowing disc sinking slowly toward the horizon, lined with cranes, its unnatural sharpness contrasting with the uniform pallor of the golden sky, like a child's drawing.
The narrator describes Mussafah as a "perverse labyrinth" of parallels and perpendicular axes. This "perverse geometry" has no point of reference and seems to hold the traveler captive, intensifying the feeling of existential isolation. It is a space that "suddenly closes in on itself." Mussafah appears as a fictional universe in which buildings dance like "immaterial entities" in the flat light. This staging disrupts reality and transforms the place into a "cursed place" ("lieu maudit") where the narrator begins to doubt his own sanity.
The desert and Mussafah together form an anatomy of damnation. While the desert represents eternal, relentless nature, Mussafah is industrial hell, where the "sovereignty of the desert" has not yet been completely defeated. In Mussafah, the sand of the desert and the dust of the factories blend into an "ochre-colored mist" that blurs the boundary between the physical world and a spiritual state of "melancholy and loneliness."
In this way, Ferrari transforms real geography into a transcendent cartography of failure. The Mussafah industrial zone is staged as a liminal space, immersed in the "diffused clarity of the limbs." Here, the boundary between reality and miracle collapses. The endless line of trucks transporting waste into the desert symbolizes a circular, purposeless existence, a ghost caravan. Abdelnour loses himself in a labyrinth. This sterile symmetry offers no orientation but rather holds the subject captive in a "holographic" solitude.
The encounter with a Syrian in Mussafah is interpreted as that of a celestial entity or an angel of God, sent from the immensity of the desert to break the "curse" of being lost. The encounter with the "lost Syrian" in this labyrinth marks a moment of ontological leveling. The Syrian is not merely a migrant, but Abdelnour's mirror image: both are lost in the same emptiness. While Abdelnour gazes at the sterile aesthetics of the Corniche, his wife Nardjess stares at the dying mangrove—an organic relic that, like her soul, appears bloodless. The historical yearning for the purity of the desert is deconstructed here; it is buried beneath asphalt and pipes, a chimera of globalized modernity.
Intertextual construction of the 'indigenous' and the 'traveler'
Ferrari uses intertextuality as an instrument to subvert postcolonial identity constructions. Wilfred Thesiger and T.E. Lawrence serve as reference points for a “European naiveté” that misuses the space of the Other as a moral laboratory.
The intertextual references form the moral skeleton upon which the protagonist Abdelnour's damnation is suspended. Ferrari uses the quotation (from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, French Les Sept Piliers de la sagesse), in order to devise a metaphysical coordinate system for the novel. In it, Lawrence postulates that the human mind invented hell as compensation to balance the "deficit of life" and the shame of "obscene incarnation." Through this quotation, Ferrari introduces the motif of the "Great Book," in which good and evil are relentlessly recorded for Judgment Day. T.E. Lawrence thus becomes a mirror image for the protagonist: in 1918, Lawrence saw himself in the mirror not as a hero, but as a "pitre" (clown) in Arab disguise, a liar who sent the Arabs to their deaths for a false promise. Abdelnour repeats this "ignominie" (disgrace) in his own existence in Abu Dhabi. He sees himself as an "imposter," whose conversion to Islam and whose life as a privileged teacher are merely roles played by a "mediocre actor." His “double apostasy” – the turning away from his Christian heritage through conversion and the later return as a failed supplicant before the priest of his childhood – underlines Lawrence’s realization that despite all the masks he is “nothing” and has finally dissolved his identity in a foreign land.
These adventures of young people are made up of preludes to the adventures of the foudroyante with the desert that is immédiatement, en raison de sa rudesse même, with a ferveur mystique. The voyagea with the Bédouins, with pied and with two bedrooms, gravit des dunes immense balayées par le vent, supportavec eux le froid glacial et la chaleur, il souffrit with eux la faim et la soif. […] the apprit à se passer du superflu, puis de l'essentiel, jusqu'à parvenir à état de dénuement total qui lui apporta sans nul doute des satisfactions inouïes parce qu'il était le seul chemin d'accès à la plus haute pureté spiritual. This year, these innovations techniques can be used in these areas, which are difficult to represent an abomination.
These adventures of his youth, however, were only the prelude to his overwhelming encounter with the desert, which he immediately fell in love with mystical fervor because of its harshness. He traveled with the Bedouins on foot and by camel, climbed enormous, windswept dunes, endured the icy cold and the heat with them, and suffered with them hunger and thirst. […] He learned to renounce the superfluous and then even the essential, until he reached a state of complete deprivation that undoubtedly gave him unimagined satisfaction because it was the only path to the highest spiritual purity. In his eyes, all technological innovations that could make this life less agonizing were an abomination.
In his analysis of Wilfred Thesiger and his text (Arabian Sands, French Le désert des désertsFerrari exposes the “colossal European naiveté” that views foreign worlds merely as “terrain for moral experiments.” Thesiger idealized the hunger, thirst, and suffering of the Bedouin as a path to “supreme spiritual purity” and “ascetic heroism.” Ferrari reveals this as an egocentric desire: Thesiger loved everything that was not like Europe and therefore perceived the modernization of Abu Dhabi as an “Arabian nightmare” (“cauchemar arabe”) because it destroyed his aesthetic ideal. In doing so, Thesiger ignored the real, brutal misery of the locals, who—unlike the British explorer—were quite willing to exchange their harsh lives for modern comforts. The protagonist recognizes his own moral failing in Thesiger: Both are travelers who want to revel in the “untouched wilderness” while remaining blind to the human suffering of those who actually inhabit this world.
This intertextual reference highlights the Westerner's "guiltish blindness," as he travels the world to test his own "inner purity" while simultaneously profiting from a system in which workers perish as "faceless men" in the heat. Ferrari unmasks the "hell of invisibility." While the "travelers" (Thesiger as well as Abdelnour) use the space for their metaphysical experiments, the "indigenous"—the nameless construction workers on Saadiyat—die an invisible death. Their disappearance from the scaffolding of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is the ultimate consequence of a world built on the blood of those whose existence has been ontologically erased.
The second novel in the trilogy is also linked to Corsica, as the island serves as the emotional and moral focal point of the entire narrative. The narrator initially flees the "monotony of existence" and the moral decay of his homeland, where he perceives his fellow citizens as "pigs" who shamelessly boast of their own depravity. During his exile in Abu Dhabi, his perception of Corsica oscillates between a "niaiserie sentimentale" (sentimental folly), which moves him to tears when he hears Corsican songs while stuck in traffic, and the bitter realization that his failure abroad has ultimately left him "nothing." His return to the island marks his final "exile," where he discovers that the familiar landscapes have been disfigured by ugly villas and commercial centers, and that the "sepulchral silence" of the harbor in November has become a direct consequence of his own greed.
At the same time, France provides the institutional and cultural framework that Ferrari uses to unmask Western hubris and social segregation. As an employee of the French lycée and thus of "Éducation nationale," the protagonist critically reflects on French expatriate society, which he describes as an "arrogant elite" with an often "uniform racism" toward the local population. The passage about the return journey via Paris's Roissy airport, in particular, becomes a reckoning with a modern French identity that hides behind cynical and meaningless slogans like "Paris vous aime" (Paris loves you), while treating travelers like "beggars" or "cattle" and transforming airports into "supermarkets of hell." In his “double apostasy” – the turning away from both his Christian heritage and his attempted Muslim identity – the narrator embodies the failure of a French intellectual who tries in vain to escape the “ignominie” (disgrace) of his own masquerade through a geographical flight.
Impossible Return and the King of Time
Bien sur, le desert a finalement été vaincu: a réseau de tuyaux noirs court le long du sol pour arroser des massifs de fleurs et des pelouses also verdoyantes que les verts paradis. If Wilfred Thesiger is available from Abu Dhabi as he knows, he will have the power to create a prefaced vengeresse parce that his heart will be brisé net, with a crystal that is pure and fragile; il n'aurait pu tolérer les grtte-ciel scintillants alignés le long de la Corniche dont les huit voies sont parcourues dans les deux sens par un flot continu de voitures, les immense centers commercial, l'omniprésence des publicités pour des marques de luxe. […] Abu Dhabi ne ressemblait encore en rien à la ville immense où je me suis installé et où je les perdrais bientôt toutes les deux.
Of course, the desert was eventually conquered: a network of black pipes runs along the ground to irrigate flowerbeds and lawns as green as paradise. Had Wilfred Thesiger been able to see Abu Dhabi as I know it, he wouldn't even have had the strength to write a vindictive preface, for his heart would have shattered like a crystal too pure and too fragile; he wouldn't have been able to bear the glittering skyscrapers along the Corniche, its eight lanes in each direction filled with a constant stream of cars, the vast shopping malls, the ubiquitous advertisements for luxury brands. […] Abu Dhabi still bore no resemblance whatsoever to the sprawling city where I had settled and where I would soon lose both.
The “conquered” desert is a metaphor for the total subjugation of nature to capitalism. The irrigation of artificial “paradises” symbolizes the “endless deception” the framing narrator speaks of: creating an illusion of happiness (green lawns in the desert) while the moral substance (the soul) withers. This passage marks the place where the narrator loses his family—the artificial splendor of the city is the backdrop for his ultimate damnation.
À Saadiyat, sur le chantier de construction du Louvre, une armée d'ouvriers plantent dans le sable des milliers de tiges d'acier qui s'enfoncent dans les profondeurs du desert jusqu'aux roches souterraines. In three années, the frénésie des Bâtisseurs n'a pas connu a seul moment de répit, les grues se dressent à l'horizon et, de tous les pays de misère, les hommes ne cessent d'accourir pour se hisser sur les échafaudages vers un rêve qui ne se réalisera jamais. […] des chantiers frénétiques où s'affairent sur les échafaudages des hommes sans visage et sans nom, titubant dans la chaleur et parfois tombant et disparaissant alors à jamais, si parfaitement que c'est comme s'ils n'avaient jamais vécu.
In Saadiyat, at the Louvre construction site, an army of workers rams thousands of steel rods into the sand, reaching deep into the desert and down to the bedrock. For thirty years, the construction workers' frenetic activity has known not a single moment of peace; the cranes still tower on the horizon, and men from all over the world, plagued by poverty, flock to the site to climb the scaffolding and realize a dream that will never come true. […] hectic construction sites where faceless and nameless men swarm around on scaffolding, staggering in the heat and sometimes falling, and then disappearing forever, so completely, as if they had never lived.
In this passage, the industrial zone (extended to include the large construction sites) is metaphorically portrayed as a place of disappearance. The sinking of the steel rods into the "heart of the desert" symbolizes the deep-rootedness of suffering in the foundation of culture (the Louvre). The workers are the "damned," whose existence remains invisible to the privileged. This excerpt connects physical labor in the sand with metaphysical hell: it is an "endless fall" into anonymity and death, which brands the narrator's moral silence as his deepest guilt.
In the fates of Kaveesha and Nardjess, Ferrari problematizes the structural possibility of empathy. Both women are separated from their environment by "invisible walls," yet they disappear in different directions. Kaveesha's exile is a "circle of fire." Her disappearance is directed toward the past; she is dispossessed by her own son, who steals her painstakingly saved-for house. The realization that there is no return marks her final damnation.
Nardjess, Abdelnour's wife, disappears into the emptiness of the present. The metaphor of her eyes, which mutate from blue to a black "like ink," symbolizes psychological disintegration and the loss of the soul to nothingness. The "fox in the mangrove" that Nardjess and her daughter Afsaneh seek remains an unattainable symbol of a happiness structurally impossible within this system. The emotional wall between Abdelnour and Nardjess demonstrates that in a world of "structural egoism," encounters with the other can only occur as mutual alienation.
The analysis makes it clear that "coming home" remains a chimera in Ferrari's universe. Abdelnour's physical return to Corsica does not heal his ontological rupture; he remains an apostate who has lost not only his faith but also the illusion of a coherent identity. His attempt at metamorphosis has definitively failed. As the final image suggests, his soul sinks "ever deeper into the night," into a realm beyond love and touch.
The ending of Jérôme Ferrari's novel represents the final fusion of the theoretical vision of hell with the protagonist's lived reality. After attempting to escape his own identity through his experiences in Algeria and Abu Dhabi, the narrator ultimately returns to Corsica as a man who has failed both in life and in himself.
The ending takes up the “theory of hell” formulated at the beginning, according to which the damned are marked not by crimes, but by the “vacuity of their souls” and the “dryness of their hearts.” In the end, Nardjess, the narrator’s wife, is portrayed as one of these shadow souls in the “vast subterranean dwelling” of hell. Her condition is characterized by total petrification and immobility; she is incapable of participating in the “infamous comedy” of the other damned because she remembers fragments of a terrible truth that she can neither fully comprehend nor forget. Her “heart of ice” is no longer accessible to any love, kiss, or comforting word—a bitter metaphor for absolute spiritual isolation.
The entire text is permeated by the narrator's desire to become someone else through travel and the adoption of new identities (such as his conversion to Islam as "Abdelnour"). In the end, however, he must recognize that he has remained merely a "mediocre actor" in disguise. He returns to his starting point as a "double apostate" (a renegade of both Christianity and Islam), only to discover that his failure to become someone else has rendered him utterly "nothing." His return to Corsica is not a homecoming, but a solitary exile within his own memory, where even his mother acts as if his wife and daughter had never existed.
A central motif of the ending is the "acquiescence" (assumption) to the injustice of the world. Looking back, the narrator realizes that by simply continuing to live in the luxury of Abu Dhabi—while construction workers fall like anonymous shadows in the heat—he has become complicit in the "invisible hell." He understands too late that a "proof of love without tangible signs" is worthless. His escape to Riyadh and the sexual encounter with Nardjess there before his departure are portrayed as a final estrangement, which he experienced as akin to touching a "carcass." This moral failure leads to the loss of Nardjess and his daughter Afsaneh, whom he can ultimately only preserve in his mind as "fragments of the past."
The scene just before the narrator's departure for Riyadh marks the final moral and emotional collapse of his marriage and cruelly illustrates Ferrari's "theory of hell." As the narrator drinks his coffee in the kitchen at four in the morning, Nardjess approaches him with a face "pale as wax" and devoid of any expression. Her question, "Will you leave us?" reads like a dark prophecy. The ensuing sexual interaction is described as a profoundly "obscene gesture": Nardjess places his hand between her legs, yet her face remains completely impassive; there is no desire, only the "aberrant functioning of a body abandoned by its soul in turmoil."
This experience becomes an "open wound" in the narrator's memory. He leaves the house without kissing his sleeping daughter Afsaneh, believing he no longer has the right to do so after this act. While in Saudi Arabia, he reflects on "culpable blindness" and realizes that he is responsible for the state of his world because he has given it his "assumption." He understands too late that love for which there are no "tangible signs" is worthless.
The consequence of this failure is total loss: Upon his return to Abu Dhabi, he learns through a phone call from his distraught housekeeper, Kaveesha, that Nardjess and Afsaneh have disappeared – he knows instinctively that “no one is waiting for him at home anymore.” Years later, after his return to Corsica as a “double apostate,” his wife and daughter remain not as faded memories, but as “fragments of the past, shrouded in the secret folds of the present.”
These fragments—the henna print on his palm, the scent of incense, the image of the young woman with the gold belt—surround him in his solitude and make him feel “less alone,” even though he knows he has lost her forever through his inability to love truly and his silence. As the narrator lingers in his memories, Nardjess, in the novel’s final vision, sinks ever deeper into the “eternity of night,” an eternal exile from which there is no return.
The novel ends with a second address to the "King of Time," which returns the modern events to the almost mythical framework in order to complete the "theory of hell" and finally seal the fate of the characters.
The narrator implores the "beloved king" to join him in gazing into the "vast subterranean abode of hell," should God grant them the strength to bear this horrifying sight. In the darkest corner of this hell, the shadowy figure of a young woman becomes visible—Nardjess, the protagonist's wife. Her condition is characterized by total petrification and a split identity: her left eye is sky blue, her right blacker than coal powder. While the other damned live in an "endless deception," believing they are alive or in palaces, Nardjess is condemned to remember fragments of the truth. This memory of the "revelation" (the nightmare of truth) prevents her from participating in the "infamous comedy" of the other damned, but simultaneously leaves her suspended in a state of vertigo between knowledge and ignorance.
While dawn breaks for the narrator and the king, as the "radiant morning" dawns and birds sing, the figure of the young woman (Nardjess) sinks ever deeper into the "darkness of night." This contrast underscores the finality of damnation: for those who have embarked on the path of exile or hell, there is no return. The book concludes with the resigned realization that justice and mercy remain incomprehensible to the human mind, which is made of the "fleeting substance of dreams." For Ferrari, hell is not a physical place, but rather the total inability to love and to recognize truth, culminating in eternal psychological isolation.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
