At chic Babylon Cove in Fort Lauderdale, snowbirds Quebecers, Sunday intellectuals with flexible morals, bought condos at a discount, taking advantage of the financial crisis.
Behind the facade of their artificial friendship, they are jealous, gauge and judge each other. Among them, Marc, a filmmaker out of inspiration, who takes refuge in reading Seneca to escape his meaningless existence, his wife Louise and their daughter Rose, apostle of Nietzsche, who despises his adoptive parents having torn from her native Haiti. There is also a shameless plastic surgeon; a declining former Minister of Culture who still dreams of independence; Hélène, who runs a “gossip newspaper cheap », a man-eater, whose most recent husband, Peeters, is a Flemish defrocked monk.
By putting in place these detestable and pathetic characters, who do everything to camouflage or drown their distress, the screenwriter and director Guillaume Sylvestre offers with this first novel a grating and earthy satire of a society in perdition, where the new gods are the race in the sales, slot machines, silhouettes sculpted with a scalpel and social ascent, the ultimate consecration of which, and which obsesses all the characters, would be to be invited to the party New Year’s Day of M. L., the richest man in Quebec.
In the background, the reader is drawn into the glaucous underworld of another Florida, that of the inhabitants and left behind, following Rose and also Alexandre, the son of Hélène, a depressive and cynical bourgeois, then Peeters , a hallucinated character who discovers Florida with growing dread, certain that his soul is in perdition. The three will foment a secret alliance, which will culminate in an orgiastic final with the air of bacchanalia.
The fall of Babylon
William Sylvester
XYZ – Dock No. 5 collection
288 pages