“Not only are we no longer capable of seeing the tragedies that have befallen us, but we are incapable even of registering our own incapacity to do so…Duteurtre sees, and records what he sees.” ~ Milan Kundera

Sample translation available

This satire, set in a world soon to be our own, exposes the excesses of the society of spectacle, litigious and overlegislated, where the appearance of innocence is more important than innocence itself.

The story follows Désiré Johnson, a delinquent sentenced to death, and the nameless narrator, a civil servant enjoying a civilized middle age. The first, as his last request, asks to smoke a cigarette, a privilege provided for by law but long since denied to prisoners, in a society sententiously attuned to issues of health and pollution. In Désiré, Big Tobacco finds a media darling. Permitted a final smoke on network television, he wins the nation’s hearts and the president’s pardon when he stops to pick flowers on the way to his execution. When the narrator is caught indulging his cigarette habit in the office bathroom by a little girl, he too is enjoying his final peaceful smoke. His attempts to secure her silence over their “little secret” only cause her to report him, wrongfully, as a child molester. His civilized lifestyle upended, he is progressively bewildered by a world that refuses to believe him. Just as public interest wanes in his case, a terrorist group takes the international limelight by staging a reality show with their hostages, where death awaits the unsuccessful contestant. Walking away from the ruins of his life, Duteurtre’s hero finds a sardonic and unpredictable solution, at once tragic and farcical, to the question of his fate.