Books › Super-Cannes
Super-Cannes
First published 2000 · 400 pages
A sun-drenched, clinical descent into the moral vacuum of an ultra-wealthy corporate utopia.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like walking through a pristine, glass-walled corporate campus while a persistent, low-frequency hum vibrates in your teeth. It is a masterclass in creeping dread, wrapping you in the sterile, sun-drenched luxury of the French Riviera before slowly peeling back the veneer to reveal the rot underneath. The prose is famously clinical and detached, observing horrific moral decay with the cold precision of a medical examiner. You are lulled into a steady, hypnotic rhythm of architectural perfection and affluent boredom, only to find yourself spiraling into a paranoid, feverish nightmare of corporate psychopathy. It is a deeply unsettling, cerebral experience designed for readers who love sharp, cynical dissections of late-stage capitalism, where extreme privilege inevitably breeds extreme violence.
- Mood
- sterile
- paranoid
- sun-drenched
- claustrophobic
- dread-soaked
- Tone
- clinical
- satirical
- detached
- cynical
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- corporate psychopathy · moral decay · technological alienation · the illusion of utopia · bourgeois depravity
- The writing
- Cold, precise, and clinically elegant, using architectural and medical terminology to normalize the grotesque.
- The arc
- Begins with detached, affluent boredom and spirals into a feverish, paranoid obsession with hidden violence.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave cerebral, unsettling satires about the dark, violent underbelly of late-stage capitalism and extreme privilege.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- sexual violence
- racism
- psychological manipulation
- drug use
About the book
In the hills above Cannes, a European elite has gathered in the business-park Eden-Olympia, a closed society that offers its privileged residents luxury homes, private doctors, private security forces, their own psychiatrists, and other conveniences required by the modern businessman. The book's protagonist, Paul, quits his job as an editor and moves to Eden-Olympia with his wife Jane when she is offered a job there as a pediatrician. At first glance, Eden-Olympia seems the ideal workers' paradise, but beneath its glittering, glass-wall surface, all is not well.
Description from Open Library.
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