The Principle, by Jerôme Ferrari
If winning the Prix Goncourt is without any doubt extremely prestigious, it most certainly also is a tough act to follow for a writer. With The Principle, however, Jerôme Ferrari proves that his inspiration - and his talent - is endless. This is Ferrari's first novel after the Sermon on the Fall of Rome, which earned him the Prix Goncourt in 2012.
Ferrari declared in an interview for the French newspaper Le Monde in 2012 that literature was "the best remedy to stupidity". In this new novel, he takes stock of the failings of civilisation during the 20th century and inserts their implications into a compelling vision of the contemporary world. His story is one of eternal returns, of a perpetual fall of Icarus - the inevitably compromised meeting between a man’s soul and the mysterious beauty of the world.
The novel revolves around the character of a young, disenchanted philosopher and his fascination for the figure of German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who coined the notorious 'uncertainty principle' - disprupting the assumptions behind quantum mechanics and earning him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1932.
Now, there is no need to be scared by the plot of Ferrari's novel if you are not - like me - well-versed in the field of quantum physics. Further than the mere vulgarisation of a scientific principle, the novel is an intense reflection on the contemporary world. It depicts the main character's struggle with the fact that "there is a fuzziness in nature, a fundamental limit to what we can know about the behaviour of quantum particles", and aims to show his attempts to right his own intellectual and emotional course, and take the measure of the evil at work in the contemporary world.
Critics have been particularly enthusiastic about The Principle:
"An elegant, cheerless meditation on how even the brightest people can find it in themselves to accommodate evil on the way to annihilation"
—Kirkus Reviews
“The extreme beauty of Ferrari’s language is at the service of a poetic expressive intelligence that allows him to approach the unknown and hostile continent of quantum physics. A fascinating dive into a novelistic and entirely unexpected experience.” —L’Orient Littéraire
“With a construction as precise as that of a theorem, The Principle moves beyond the single evocation of a life and its murky areas to better interrogate the basis of all truth.” —L’Express
For those of you bookworms and francophiles who want to know more about The Principle, you can watch Jerôme Ferrari's interview on French TV channel France 24 here, and watch him talk about his novel in further details here.
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