Mourareau

Méridien zéro

Meridian Zero

March 19, 2020
Novel
248 pages
190 × 240 mm
16 €
9782367342139
978-2-3673-4213-9
									Mourareau, Méridien zéro
									Mourareau, Méridien zéro

In this jubilant nihilistic novel, Mourareau, as a keen observer, draws a vitriolic and uncompromising portrait of a bloodless society. This three-voice novel with its dizzying rhythm, in a language full of brilliant neologisms and diversions, insidiously distils in each of us avenues for reflection and introspection.

In the near future, the world has become pretty much the worst imaginable. Countries are governed like companies listed on the stock exchange, telephones allow themselves scathing judgments about their owners, and the earth has been transformed into a giant, hysterical and uncontrollable reality TV show: everything is going down the drain. Bleu and Rose, anti-Parisian heroes representative of their species in perdition, want to believe that elsewhere, another life is possible. They are—above all—riddled with debts that leave them with no alternative but to flee. So they head for the end of the world: Polynesia. It remains to be seen whether misery is indeed less painful in the sun…
In an apocalyptic atmosphere and with a clever mix of black humor and absurdity, Mourareau paints us a satire as politically incorrect as it is disturbing and jubilant. But, as the author writes, “there is something in the joke that one could not seriously assume”, and that is what this text is all about: we laugh but we grit our teeth too. Bleu and Rose, the fruits of a putrescent society, are hateful and moving. Perhaps because it is impossible not to recognize ourselves a little in these two characters, we who all carry within us, somewhere, the possibility of a fall.
With Méridien zéro, Mourareau delivers nothing less than a novel about the decline of humanity, and this tomorrow. A funny, cynical and frightening literary UFO, to be taken at the 36th degree... or not.

The author

Born in Tahiti to a Breton alcoholic father and a Chinese mother, a self-assured bourgeois. Mourareau celebrated his two months of existence at the fall of the USSR, was a television witness of France in 1998, of 9/11 and of Lehman Brothers. He grew up on a remote island and studied without conviction or docility in some big school. An ephemeral civil servant, he resigned to answer the call of the Start-up Nation.

March 19, 2020
Novel
248 pages
190 × 240 mm
16 €
9782367342139
978-2-3673-4213-9