Description
Las Vegas, an artificial city brought to life in the heart of the Mojave desert, is the ultimate urban temptation: its shopping malls, theme parks and casinos offer an unceasing parade of entertainments and diversions. Its architecture combines slick, commercial seduction with a childish, caricature-like appearance; its streets and arcades are repeatedly animated with visitors and residents willingly submitting to the opium of this spectacular place.
Las Vegas has at all times fascinated those who write about the American malaise, from Tom Wolfe to J. G. Ballard, but Bégout reveals the city’s other side, adding a valuable philosophical dimension to the nightmarish, incredible visions that haunt the imagination of novelists and film-makers. The writer draws minutely detailed portraits in the form of city scenes – portraits that are regularly tragic and every so often extremely comic. Bégout lets himself be dragged into this party, this “paradise for bastards”, as Nick Tosches calls it.
For Bégout, Las Vegas is the consummation of the modern city, the ultimate destination of our urban experiments, the great supermarket of the global village. “Neither near nor far, neither here nor elsewhere, Las Vegas is distinguished by nothingness. For us it is zeropolis, the non-city that may be the first actual city, just as zero is the first actual number.”
“It is a real gem, as brilliant and remarkable as its subject”—Livres Hebdo
“Bégout felicitously combines the philosopher’s capacity for thinking with
the novelist’s descriptive power. A success.”—Le Nouvel Observateur
Las Vegas has at all times fascinated those who write about the American malaise, from Tom Wolfe to J. G. Ballard, but Bégout reveals the city’s other side, adding a valuable philosophical dimension to the nightmarish, incredible visions that haunt the imagination of novelists and film-makers. The writer draws minutely detailed portraits in the form of city scenes – portraits that are regularly tragic and every so often extremely comic. Bégout lets himself be dragged into this party, this “paradise for bastards”, as Nick Tosches calls it.
For Bégout, Las Vegas is the consummation of the modern city, the ultimate destination of our urban experiments, the great supermarket of the global village. “Neither near nor far, neither here nor elsewhere, Las Vegas is distinguished by nothingness. For us it is zeropolis, the non-city that may be the first actual city, just as zero is the first actual number.”
“It is a real gem, as brilliant and remarkable as its subject”—Livres Hebdo
“Bégout felicitously combines the philosopher’s capacity for thinking with
the novelist’s descriptive power. A success.”—Le Nouvel Observateur
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