When a Fanciful Billionaire Is Thrust Into a Nightmarish Brussels: “You Europeans Have Really Ugly Faces”

Bernard Minier could hardly have offered visit.brussels a stronger reason to invite him back to the capital. The French thriller writer, one of Europe’s most widely read authors in the genre, has preserved a nightmarish view of Brussels, and his new novel, “Ruptures,” turns that vision into an urban descent into hell.

The story follows Lucia Guerrero and Milton Gail, a billionaire who serves as a fictional double of Elon Musk, as they move through a Brussels with two sharply contrasting faces. One is the cold, hushed and authoritarian world of the Berlaymont, described as the European Commission’s “hideous headquarters.” The other is the sordid and violent city of the margins, centered on Rue d’Aerschot and the Northern Quarter.

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the last time Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès was seen, he was holding my first novel

After leaving his luxury suite at the Corinthia Grand Hotel Astoria, Gail, high on ketamine, heads into the Brussels night in search of “the hottest streets.” Starting from Rue Royale, he encounters youths near Rue des Plantes asking, “Man, do you want condoms, drugs?” When he refuses, one of them spits on the ground.

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Man, do you want condoms, drugs?

The novel then moves toward Brussels-North station, portrayed as a refuge for “all the social outcasts, the marginalised, the mad, the drunks and the misfits.” Rue d’Aerschot grows increasingly filthy as Gail advances, with tagged facades, rubbish-strewn pavements, Red Bull cans and used condoms. Behind the windows, Minier depicts very young women, mostly African, with towering heels, heavy makeup, bleached extensions and claw-like nails.

The scene reaches its bleakest point in a dive where clients masturbate over toilet bowls while mice run between their legs. Completely drunk, Gail turns on the local customers with contempt: “How’s it going, you losers? […] You Europeans have really ugly faces, on the whole.” A beating follows.

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How’s it going, you losers? […] You Europeans have really ugly faces, on the whole.