Olivia Rosenthal's Dystopian Novel Imagines a World of Speculative Ruin

Olivia Rosenthal's novel "On n'est pas là pour disparaître" (published by Éditions Gallimard) presents a darkly humorous speculative narrative set in a château, where an ordinary employee named B works for the agency Admiration Service (slogan: "Faites-nous confiance"). B is tasked with evaluating potential for developing therapeutic leisure activities for a clientele of declining personalities. The story critiques the standardization of taste in a globalized society, with B musing that "the Americans and the Chinese would love it" and that he could compete for the tourist operation of the year. The château is eerily animated, and B conducts his feasibility study under the watch of a guard obsessed with Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining." The narrative blends the fantastic with family history—dreams of grandeur, secrets in antique furniture, and the decay of a lineage. The surrounding nature threatens development plans, as if seeking revenge. The author, described as an anxious landscaper, poses a major question: what will remain of us, so preoccupied with fortune and posterity? The review by Jérôme Lebrun in artpress highlights the novel's Sadean wit and its extrapolation of a future from a consumed present.