Michaël Ferrier's 'Sympathie pour le fantôme' Unearths Hidden Histories

Michaël Ferrier's novel 'Sympathie pour le fantôme,' published by Gallimard in the L'Infini collection, is a major literary event of the season. The book aims to decode messages from the dead, focusing on ghosts 'removed from History or not allowed in.' Ferrier uses the novel as a 'mobile form' to reconstitute memory and contest dominant narratives. The narrator, also named Michaël, is a French literature professor at the University of Tokyo who works in television and journalism. He collaborates with his colleague Yuko on a TV program about France, proposing three portraits of 'invisible' historical figures: Ambroise Vollard, a Creole art dealer; Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire's muse; and Edmond Albius, an enslaved horticulturist. Ferrier critiques both academia and television, describing literature as 'the great enemy of the university' and TV as a 'vast, empty universe.' The novel compresses time, arguing that the past does not pass. Ferrier's style is described as precise and combative, using language like a musket.