Marc Biancarelli

Marc Biancarelli's "Roman national" (Actes Sud, 2026), in the guise of a historical novel, paints a complex picture of Corsica as a "dual island," simultaneously subjugated by external domination and asserted by internal cultural resources. Against the backdrop of Sampieru Corso's uprising in 1564, the text traces the lives of Fioravante and Catalina, who embody two contrasting responses to a society without stable political institutions—adherence to local loyalties and logics of revenge on the one hand, and radical detachment and self-definition on the other. In three narrative arcs (childhood, war, aftermath), Biancarelli combines documented events with subjective perspectives, systematically subverting the expectation of a heroic national epic by showing that the supposed struggle for liberation is driven less by collective ideals than by private motives and ultimately fails due to internal divisions. The novel's argument thus aims at a deconstruction of the "national novel" as a genre, revealing national identity as a retrospective, selective construction that particularly obscures violence against women—a blind spot explicitly addressed by the central character Catalina—while simultaneously highlighting language, specifically Corsican, as the true bearer of continuity and resistance, eluding state control. Formally, this thesis is reflected in a polyphonic narrative structure without a privileged authority, presenting history as a field of competing voices. In terms of content, an anthropology of violence is developed that understands it not as an exception, but as a circulating principle of social order. From this perspective, Catalina's movement of separation appears as the only non-destructive form of action, so that the novel as a whole can be read as a paradoxical national novel that exposes the conditions of collective identity formation by simultaneously subverting them narratively.