Bringing Back the Dead

This chapter is about François, Portrait d’un absent, in which Ferrier gives us a portrait of his childhood friend, lost to a freak accident with his young daughter in 2013. The book shows Ferrier at his most hybrid, generically and stylistically speaking; it has a particularly strong link to film, which fits with François’s career as a filmmaker. It is also a visually striking work, although Ferrier never allows the visual to dominate entirely, thanks to his strong commitment to the aural aspect of language. The work is also shot through with a formal and thematic belief in the power of language to defeat death, or at least to cheat it of its finality, and the chapter shows how Ferrier makes expert use of ghosts, dreams and half-way states of consciousness, as well as a peculiarly performative use of language, to ‘bring back’ his friend to life.