The Baldwins

In the post-apocalyptic future, 50 years after the last government of turbo-liberals and its president-for-life have been elected, a group of researchers convenes a Congress to address the curious cultural phenomenon of the Baldwins, whose stories have been gathered and archived by the chroniclers since the end of history. “Who are the Baldwins?” the Congress asks. “Do they actually exist, and if so, what is their history and their fate?” Only one thing seems certain to these Baldwinologists: “The Baldwins resemble us: they knew nothing of their origins, nor of their destination.”

Set in the landscape of one vast disposal site containing all the refuse of history, and using the rhetorical conventions of precise, objective, depersonalized scholarly research, the world Serge Lamothe brilliantly creates with this novel of fragments is one of a mysterious ambiguity, haunted by Kafka, Orwell, Gibson and Fukuyama.

This is contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental, creating a post-historical world so devoid of difference that the only imaginable use of language is for the mass production of consent—a world in which a nine-year-old’s suicide bombing may well, in fact, constitute the only meaningful act left to The Baldwins: a joyful embrace of the ultimate existential gesture, in which all difference is obliterated, consummated in a martyrdom of innocence on the consensual altar of the morally and politically correct.