Patrik Ourednik - O Fim do Mundo Não Terá Acontecido

From Paris to the White House, translator Gaspard Boisvert—former advisor to "the stupidest American president in the country's history," creator of slogans for spirits, and plausible great-grandson of Hitler—attempts to escape unscathed from the ongoing global process of dumbing down. However, tormented by phrases such as "Western democracy is the ultimate stage of an advanced society," "the excision of the clitoris constitutes a cultural fact," or "one must know how to predict in advance," he ends up succumbing to a nervous breakdown. Gaspard's story sets the tone for a narrator committed to providing embarrassing statistics on the human species—favorite sex toys, bloodthirsty record holders, dietary restrictions of devotees—in this novel laden with Hašek-esque humor and Rabelais-esque irony, in the vein of Europeana. The End of the World Will Not Have Happened (2017) reveals a Patrik Ouředník fascinated with the apocalypse, throwing himself tooth and nail at the commonplaces of discourse and the unstoppable cretinism of our times.