BLACK WATER
Nine guests come aboard a financier’s luxury yacht for a cruise which is meant to take them from Saint-Tropez to the Italian islands. Among the party: a writer-journalist who has come to finish the memoirs of the master on board and his girlfriend, devastated by a drama than unites them and separates them in a contradictory surge of passion and destruction. There is also the too-perfect American actress and her insipid lover, the famous plastic surgeon claiming to have rejuvenated fifty percent of “anybody who’s anybody” on the planet, and the drug-addicted former rock manager and his wife, both enthusiastic aficionados of urinotherapy, not forgetting the couple of old vipers venomously criticising anything that moves. Nights follow days in a succession of taut private conversations, amusing gossiping sessions, sumptuous parties, animated dinners, trips ashore, the depths of boredom and the height of madness. The sea also plays its part, gentle and violent, blue and oh so black.
The bodies of some shipwrecked stowaways soon disrupt the machinations of this micro-society cut off from the world. Tension, exasperation and mounting animosity between some of the guests gradually drag the wonderful cruise down into a nightmare in which verbal confrontations vie with more radical threats as they draw closer and closer to the African coast.
Fabrice Gaignault is culture and celebrities editor for the French edition of Marie Claire. He has written six books including Égéries sixties (Fayard, 2006), Dictionnaire de littérature à l’usage des snobs (Scali, 2007), translated into several languages, and Aspen terminus (Grasset, 2010).
Des corps de clandestins naufragés viennent bientôt enrayer la mécanique parfaite de cette petite société coupée du monde. Les tensions et les exaspérations, les antipathies grandissantes entre certains, font peu à peu sombrer la belle croisière dans un cauchemar où les affrontements verbaux le disputent aux menaces diffuses plus radicales au fur et à mesure que les côtes africaines se rapprochent.