After two collections of poetry and a literary essay, Quentin Mouron reconnects with his romantic streak in “La dernière chambre du Grand Hôtel Abîme”. A fictional dive into the merciless world of influencers, this story with the false air of a detective story explores the cruelty and solitude that digital vertigo engenders.
Social networks are his second writing table. Literary notations, immediate poems, crazy aphorisms, Quentin Mouron delivers the lively traits of his greedy spirit on a daily basis. Actor in the digital world, media columnist, the French-speaking writer observes from the inside the emergence of a caste of young people known for their notoriety: YouTubers and influencers, these new glossators enjoy a credit that journalists and journalists have lost. scientists.
With “The Last Room of the Grand Hotel Abîme”, Quentin Mouron tells the more-than-perfect story of the Venetian pilgrimage of a handful of influencers, leading to the murder of one of them, Sixtine, found dead by the swimming pool of a grand hotel.
The wanderings of pixel beings
Starting from the discovery of the corpse, exposed in a prologue with poetic accents, this seventh novel goes back the thread of the drama to embrace the wanderings of Sam, Lola, Hugo, Rocco and Sistine, beings of pixels and desire carried away in the same bad Narcissistic trip.
She wanted to tell him how she had experienced the power of social media, her own power, but Rocco hadn’t responded to her messages like he hadn’t answered her calls, she had listened to a podcast where he was about the joint virtues of verbena and masturbation (…)
A decadent Venice
Biting in the face of their ranting, tender towards their intimate contradictions, Quentin Mouron does not make his characters soulless puppets. Well born for the most part, the latter enjoy a certain cultural capital, and their spontaneous romanticism sometimes takes precedence over their self-promotion reflexes.
But in this decadent Venice, eaten away by mass tourism, everyone wears the mask of their virtual carnival. Like a tragicomedy by Shakespeare, the playwright cited in the spotlight, the stage on which these influencers operate demands its pound of flesh and its expiatory victims.
I think we must try to express through the means of literature a reality which is itself constituted by language. And so we must be able to bring together languages, welcome languages, worlds, subjectivities and everything that is heterogeneous to itself.
Varied breaths
Faced with the casual inconsistency of its protagonists, the narration of this novel shifts, sliding from prose to verse, from verse to theatrical dialogue to better understand the subjectivities and varied breaths of its subjects.
Always with the distance provided by the use of the third person and past participles. An indication that the book, like the filter of the screens which flattens reality, does not let us be fooled by these dangerous banter.
Nicolas Julliard/mh
Quentin Mouron, “The last room of the Grand Hôtel Abîme”, ed. Favre, May 2024.
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