Houellebecq

I have read 'Atomised' and saw the film based on the first one. I felt quite depressed after seeing the film, perhaps because it was on a Sunday night and I went to the cinema on my own, which prompted too much questioning on my own existence.

Found them both clever, though stretching a bit too much to fit some of the arguments. According to my male friend who recommended his books:he is not mysoginistic, he just should have needed a good shag ,or a few,at 18.

Houellebecq began his writing career as a poet, and his recently released album, Presence humaine, his first, is best seen as an extension of his poetry. The instrumental work here sounds a lot like the pretechno synthesizer stuff that passed for French rock before MC Solaar, Air, and DJ Dimitri. Though Houellebecq doesn't play an instrument himself, he handles the lyrics, speaking (not singing) in a voice that registers somewhere around Leonard Cohen's bass. If the music is pretty insipid, the lyrics, drawn from the several volumes of Houellebecq's poetry, are not half bad. This is from the seventh and longest song on the album, "Plein ete": "Je suis le chien blesse, le technicien de surface / Etje suis Ia bouee qui soutient I'enfant mort." ("I'm the wounded dog, the technician of surface / And I'm the life preserver propping up the dead child.") In contemporary French poetry, this sort of raw imagery passes for direct statement. It's as rare as rhyming quatrains, which Houellebecq also uses. To find it, yo u have to go back to Baudelaire, the master technician of surface.

Link?

Just finished Atomised (assholes will insist I call it whatever it's called in France). Read it about a year after reading Platform and consequently deciding I'd never read another thing by the author. But resolve has never been my strong suit, and I felt I was shortchanging him by failing to consider his most celebrated novel.

Well, I enjoyed it. Sort of. It engaged me and compelled me to finish it, though by the final third I was skimming as much as I was reading. But I didn't like it. I fact I kind of hated it, much in the same way I hated Platform. It all just seems so obvious, so childish and so tiresome. He's obviously very intelligent and erudit, and it's fun to watch him draw connections between seemingly disparate things, but his view of human life and 20th century history is so one-dimensional and reactionary. And everything he does seems so calculated to outrage someone somewhere.

I just can't buy into it. None of it offends me, but none of it really convinces me, either. And the view of human relationships seems to operate at the same level as a bad night at a comedy club - a bunch of shitty, easy platitudes and cliches presented as bedrock truth. And sure, he's not wrong in pointing out that most men are rather emotionally stunted, but so what? How is this a big deal, or even an interesting observation - especially given that his characters are rarely more than two-dimensional symbolic devices.

Add an 'e' to that one erudit.

Surprised there's been so little discussion of The Possibility Of An Island on ILX, by miles his best book so far. Partly because it's fucking funny, but also because the future sections provide a contextual frame for the narrator's raging misanthropy that make you rethink your response to all previous Houllebecq voices.

I'm not discussing it 'cuz I haven't read it, but you've got me intrigued. I want to find something worthwhile in his writing. Something beyond the superficial amusements, I mean - cuz those are definitely there, but they aren't doing it for me. I want to like him because he's so well-respected and so obviously intelligent. I figure I must be missing something.

Reminds me a lot of the late Kingsley Amis novels that my parents used to bring into the house - much like my cat brings in bits of mice and birds now. Fascist? Misogynist? Racist? Probably. Fuck him anyway.

In a nutshell. I'm refraining from going that far, cuz I think there must be something more to it. But if so, it's awful damn well hidden.

technicien de surface = French euphemism for a street sweeper's job denomination. Houellebecq = French swollen headed misanthropic hack

fffffffffffffucke this

i should reread...see if i still like

My friend gave one of his books (Atomised?) for a birthday present. Almost put it in the *read in the year 2525* but then I read some rather interesting article on him. He seems like a literary Gainsbourg. (Correct me, I *know* I am wrong.)

Still have an other 17,5 years left.

Possibility of an Island is IMO his worse book. I still have some affection for his first one but I don't know the title of it in English.

yes the first one is his best and yes, i agree about the title.

Whatever is the title of the first one in English. I've only read Platform so I guess I'll work my way back before reading the newest one. I'm not totally convinced about this guy either way yet.

in english it's called "whatever" and in french it's called "Extension du domaine de la lutte" which translates as "the extension of the battlefield".

Houellebecq definitely has a schtick: reactionary, clinically depressed, nihilistic provocateur. The French public loves to be provoked and it has a long history in French letters with Celine being another relatively recent example. For me, it's hard to tell if this is him for real, or a series of voices he's taking on and that's what makes him vaguely interesting. I did enjoy his first two books for this reason and also because I thought they were really inventive. The farm animal short stories in "Whatever" were hysterical.

The last two have been diminishing returns and just felt like caricatures of the schtick. "Platform" had its moments, but just sort of devolved into pointless pseudo porn and violence. I couldn't finish "Possibility of an Island" because it was one of the most nihilistic things I've ever encountered even though I thought the premise was really fascinating.

Houellebecq definitely has a schtick: reactionary, clinically depressed, nihilistic provocateur. The French public loves to be provoked and it has a long history in French letters... For me, it's hard to tell if this is him for real, or a series of voices he's taking on and that's what makes him vaguely interesting.

I'm underwhelmed by his prose and I'd be more depressed by his general take on stuff if I didn't think it was oh so much of a put-on. I liked Plateforme a whole lot better than La possibilité d'une île and I haven' made it far enough into Extension du domaine de la lutte which I just started to have much of an opinion. He's pretty adept as a polemicist in the enfant térrible, I'd say, though.

i thought i made 'ain't no Houellebecq girl' joke in this thread

Houellebecq's orange haired mom not dead. Promises to whack him in the face with her cane and break all of his teeth if he uses her name in book again.

LOL!!

Empress Palpatine.

le lol

«Avec Michel Houellebecq, mon fils, on pourra commencer à se reparler le jour où il ira sur la place publique, ses Particules élémentaires dans la main, et qu'il dira : “Je suis un menteur, je suis un imposteur, j'ai été un parasite, je n'ai jamais rien fait de ma vie, que du mal à tous ceux qui m'ont entouré. Et je demande pardon”.»

ptdr! This has the looks of an epic Mother/Son bitch fight.

Fucking hell she's scary.

Just finished Extension du domaine de la lutte yesterday, my first Houellebecq, and I thought it was very good. Reminded me most of Huysmans' With the Flow (which I haven't read in French but is the best novel ever). The part where the narrator and Tisserand go to the chip shop to eat chips avec quantité illimité de mayonnaise, oh man, that kills me. The way MH describes all-you-can-eat mayo really, for me, is one of the most starkly, absurdly hilarious tactics in the book. Dunno why, amid so much other brutally dark humour. Overall, so many roffles in this one, some of them approaching Beckett quality (bodies that fail, mechanically, and keep falling over, breaking, repeating, etc.), and some of the roffles make me feel guilty for laughing (like Huysmans).

I also bought Les Particules élémentaires and will start that today.

I think his first novel is his best, although Atomised certainly packs a punch. Thereafter, it's diminishing returns.

Doesn't he have a son he refuses to have anything to do with? What a charming family.

Does he? How droll!

Small island populated by drunken Brits, and a short (and, I think, old) novel by Houellebecq, whom the chattering classes like to believe represents unflinchlingly the barren spiritual landscape of etc etc etc.

-- Enrique (Enrique), Friday, 25 June 2004 09:40 (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

I liked Lanzarote (the island and the book actually). It was short but seemed to sum up all his usual themes in fewer words. Also it had photos. A good place to start. Also, he's pretty funny, although probably not always intentionally.

Also, he's pretty funny, although probably not always intentionally.

This is called "being French", I believe.

I wonder if he has a new book coming out this fall? Any word yet?

i wanna read his lovecraft dealie. flipping through his novels at bookstores, they've struck me as intellectualized pornography.

He's apparently working on a film version of La possibilité d'une île.

xpost

http://jl13.com/images/h_m.jpg

"flipping through his novels at bookstores, they've struck me as intellectualized pornography." I REALLY can't imagine anyone actually using his miserable writing as pornography.

ever read penthouse forum?

C'mon, the guy HATES sex. I imagine it interferes with his suffering.

So that's what the Sugarcubes' "Fucking in Rhythm and Sorrow" was about.

It may be lurid, ian, but Soukesian has a point. I don't think he means it to be arousing.

well, like i said, i haven't intently read his novels or anything, just picked them up and read a page here and there.

ugh i thought i had successfully forgotten abt this guy. thanks ilx. tho i'm glad about that article as further confirmation of his doucheyness. or the doucheyness of his writing persona or whatever. i mean, i don't know him, who am i to judge character based only on writing, but still, blargh gross. still, maybe i was in a terrible mood when i read elementary particles.

Did you open the thread because you thought it was about some other Houellebecq?

I wonder if he has a new book coming out this fall? Any word yet?

Why yes he does have a book out this fall. It is called Ennemis Publics and it is a collection of letters (or rather mails i guess) he exchanged with Bernard-Henri Lévy, as useless a French intellectual as there ever was. Those letters were never meant to be published seems to be what both of them say, to which I call BS. The few pages I've read are terribly self-congratulatory and ooze self satisfaction. Both recall that they are "public enemies" and that society as a whole despises them and that they are poor outcasts and blablabla. Yes, they truly are despised as it is the most published book this fall in France, they have been invited on just about every tv, radio, magazine, newspaper and god forbid anyone think differently.

I haven't read it, apart from the few extracts that you can find here and there, but just hearing about this book makes my blood boil. I hate BHL with a passion (I believe he is a bit known abroad, especially for that one book he wrote where he travelled across America and wrote a book "in the spirit of Tocqueville's "De la Démocratie"... which, well, isn't really what his book ended up being). I have no real strong opinion on Houellebecq but seeing him everywhere on TV makes me realise how much of a creep he is. He really looks the part of any of his protagonists. But I do enjoy seeing him on TV because he speaks soooo slowly. It's like he panics halfway through every sentence and ends up blanking for three seconds before continuing his sentence and blanking again etc. It's even better on the radio, where you sometimes believe the radio stopped broadcasting!

New long-ish interview is out now.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq

almost done w/ la carte et le territoire, really enjoying it, haven't read anything else

what should I be reading next? plateforme or particules elementaires? the h.p. lovecraft. book?

okay plateforme sucked, might be done w/ this guy

i recommend extension du domaine de la lutte, les particules elementaires or the lovecraft book. i found platforme weaker than those three (+ la carte et le territoire).

haha 'plateforme'...I am dyslexic in french

yeah the girl is reading particules and I guess I'll read it when she's done just cause I don't have anything else to read.

actually you were right: the french title is plateforme.

forgot to add: if you (or anyone else reading this thread) are depression-prone, maybe you should avoid reading houellebecq's writings, as it might make things worse.

ok good I was confused, 'platforme' didn't make sense w/ french rules but I was chalking it up to my generally horrible spelling...no I'm not depression-prone but plateforme's pornography was just kinda boring. otoh I was pretty amused by the over the top egoism in carte. particules seems like it's more in the vein of plateforme tho?

porn-wise particules is like plateforme, though it's a more interesting read i think -can't remember why however (it's been a while since i read them).

favorite bit of over-the-top egoism in carte: houellebecq claiming he's written the best poem about plato. he might have been talking about his pet dog though.

Apparently, he's missing at the moment. Hasn't showed up at a couple of appointments in the Netherlands and Belgium, which is very atypical, and can't be reached anywhere.

His latest book, news sites here say, is about a man who goes missing and is later found murdered?

It's all to tempting to think it's a publicity/weird Houellebecq move, but I'm not sure to be honest.

(I read this story on hbvl.be and wasn't familiar with the fantastic saying "hij stuurde zijn kat". For more than a second there I thought he actually sent his cat to those appointments... :-) )

In french, that's "poser un lapin"

Jeez, yes, I knew it in French but had never seen it in Dutch/Vlaams o_O

:-)

Meanwhile, I don't know it's a publicity move, would be a little too over the top, imo

Houellebecq, a little over the top?

ok ok lol

I thought he had a pulled hamstring. Great goal against Arsenal, though.

Update: no longer missing. He just forgot all of his appointments and hasn't had a phone or email for a while, which is why he's been unreachable since June, is the explanation.

WELCOME BACK HOUELLEBECQ

houelle, houelle, houelle

Oui, nous le taisons beaucoup
Lorsqu'il boit comme un trou
Welcome back
Houllebecq, Houllebecq, Houllebecq

I dislike this guy.

He wouldn't have it any other way.

glad to hear he is houell.

Submission is Islamophobic but it is also misanthropic and Francophobic and Houellebecq hates himself. He clearly has more affection for the secular west that he sees to be in decline but his book is really about living in an incoherent time. "You know I'm not for anything, but at least patriarchy existed as a social system." I think it's a good book.

I said some things about it on another thread, one of the rolling reading threads I think.

Serotonin is quite good

Yeah his best in a long while

I still like La carte et le territoire and Extension du domaine de la lutte so you can't suspect me of throwing the baby out with the bathwater but I couldn't finish Sérotonine.

I finished it last night, it's certainly less incendiary than Submission and on the whole better. Very removed, matches the leveled out emotional purgatory of the drug. Reminded me of Philip Roth's later Zuckerman novels after he's had his prostate removed.

hm sounds good, havent paid attn to this dude in like a decade

this sounds great. i can't wait to read it.

i enjoyed submission as well, especially the huysmans angle. the post i wrote up there is wrong -- the book wasn't islamophobic as much as it was francophobic. he is angry that the west has devolved into listless nihilism. he thinks people need higher ideals to live for--some god concept--but can't imagine what they could possibly be.

i don't think he has any affection for secular culture, even though he embodies the most secular archetype of all -- the incendiary artist.

he is an odd duck.

I guess the alt-right is cool when it writes in French.

i don't think he is alt right. race is not important to him.

j'aime cette direction

'Donald Trump is one of the best American presidents I've ever seen'.

'Speaking for myself, I've always thought of feminists as fucking stupid, mildly inoffensive in principle yet unfortunately made dangerous by their disarming absence of lucidity.'

'All in all, Islam is the dumbest the religion.'

'Since the French political class can't give satisfaction to muslims on everything, it at least gives them satisfaction on Israel by giving up on Jews – typical collaborationist behaviour.'

He has also accused environmentalist activists of 'collaborating' with Islam (keep in mind that this term is extra-loaded in France, where it refers to the Nazi occupation).

i'll never read another book by this guy after the elementary particles. i didn't mind the experience but fuckin yeesh. doesn't help that he's a shithead

Yeah he says a lot of unfortunate things. But reading submission i didn’t get the sense that he thought islam was stupider than modern france.

the thing is he hates everybody equally

yeah fair point, that argument is often used to protect idiotic provocateurs

no misanthropic writer has ever touched thomas bernhard

pom is right, Houellebecq is an alt right motherfucker which I tried to wriggle away from for years cos I do think he writes like an angel, I guess I can live with it, he's hardly the only fuckwit whose writing I enjoy

I assume he sounds more idiomatic in English, for whatever reason. He is routinely savaged by French reviewers for the mediocrity of his style, even with écriture blanche as a yardstick. I think he's alright – The Map and the Territory was in some ways his most 'literary' effort, which may also explain why he got the Goncourt that year.

I think he's been well translated yeah and seems to have a degree of input into his translations - even tho I can largely struggle my way thru French I can't *feel* it in a literary way

i got very little out of his style in the english translation, i had assumed it read better in french. so: lol

He does flat concision very well which is a harder skill than it looks

Yeah he's definitely got a knack for deflationism.

I didn't realise his mother was still alive. She must be very proud of his accomplishments!

lol

Heh, he wishes (and doesn't). His oeuvre can easily be construed as a drawn-out attempt at getting libertine hippie mommy to pay attention to him.

This interview with his "slut of a mother" (dixit Michel) is old but good: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/07/fiction.familyandrelationships

Ceccaldi says she last saw her son in 1991, before he was famous, when they had tea in a bistro on Paris's Left Bank. She says they were talking about the Gulf war when he went off on a diatribe against Arabs just to piss her off. He stormed out and they never spoke again. "He said it more to provoke me than to express his personal feelings," Ceccaldi says. "He said the war was the fault of Islam being a religion of stupid bastards. I said, 'No, you're the stupid bastard.'"

That would be the first Gulf War against noted Islamist Saddam Hussein

xxxp re: Bernhard. There is optimism hidden within all the miserablism. Re-reading Gargoyles and The Loser recently I was struck by a few sentences in each. They usually appear amind his onslaguht, pessimistic digressions and are easy to miss due to his repetetive language. One that appears mid-way through The Loser after Wertheimer's suicide reads something like, 'Every human is unique and each is a great work of art.' It was pretty staggering in context and cast the novel in a new light for me. As for Houellebecq, the humor is readily apparent though no levity, per se. Submission, to me, was his most optimistic book somehow in its full acceptance of inevitability, even if such inevitibility is predicated on cynicism or satire. It's similar to Merseualt's 'open heart to the benign indifference of the universe' in The Stranger or, say, Kraznahorkia's last few gutting pages of 'The Melancholy of Resistance.'
I could be way off here but I have to assume that such prolific writers of despair write from a deep well of hope. Otherwise why keep going? E.M. Ciroan and Pessoa, too, have some levity via the accrual of dread. Anyway, very excited to dig into Serotonin.

P.S. anyone who is into the above writer's would be well advised to check out Edouard Levé. He wrote slim novels, Suicide and Autoportrait, the last of which was delivered to his publisher on the day of his suicide.
Sheesh, I really see a lot of positive things in writers who mean none.

i completely agree with you about bernhard

check out Edouard Levé

Seconded. I have no idea whether his Œuvres – a series of conceptual art thought experiments in written form – is available in English, but it's a fascinatingly unique little book.

Also lol @ the fact that the 'E. M.' has stuck. Emil Cioran didn't have a middle name, he just made that nom de plume up because he briefly looked up to E. M. Forster and thought Brits were the epitome of class.

And although he disavowed most of his fascist beliefs after WW2, he would still be a total alt-righter today. His Cahiers are full of whinging about feminism and the countercultural left.

Houellebecq does read as idiomatic and concise in English. The Elementary Particles was not as smooth or remarkable as the last two imo.

Yelploaf OTM about the optimism of Submission, I was surprised at how passive and relatively mild its criticism of Islam was.

I had no idea about his hippie mother, that really explains everything.

Ceccaldi says. "He said the war was the fault of Islam being a religion of stupid bastards. I said, 'No, you're the stupid bastard.'"

Nice one, his mum.

I have no idea whether his Œuvres – a series of conceptual art thought experiments in written form – is available in English, but it's a fascinatingly unique little book.

― pomenitul, Wednesday, November 27, 2019 6:24 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It is! Translated as 'Works', here's a Guardian review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/06/works-edouard-leve-translated-jan-steyn-review

Nice!

https://news.yahoo.com/world-same-worse-banal-virus-says-houellebecq-114817968.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly90LmNvL3R3Tm5JUVB2T28_YW1wPTE&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAE7u5VOspeNqPJ9X9mTZdAzxipt9qx2Ydy1Dg0IraHBLg-fm99uPWB5ia4cUuJem3TtLQS2iuznMd6fDdll5Z9hUzdvjWQAAiJALjtG_EuDyaso89XJ974hzxNYwwnyz3FL6J3jicOrOb0AbSY1X4eeZ30d8-J5nV4zwgNVds67r

"I do not believe for a half-second the declarations that 'nothing will be like it was before'," said Houellebecq who rose to international fame through his 1998 novel "Atomised".

"We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world. It will be the same, just a bit worse," he said in an essay for French public radio.

"The way this epidemic has panned out is remarkably normal," he argued.

He described COVID-19 as a "banal virus" with "no redeeming qualities... It's not even sexually transmitted."

essays for french public radio vmic

*yawn*

Michel Houellebecq Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Bore People

he's absolutely wrong if he thinks having sex with someone who is incubating the rona isn't going to transmit it you!

i thought submission was an interesting book but i literally could not read serotonin. i think i threw my copy away.

the book begins with some sad boomer discovering his japanese girlfriend -- who he hates -- has been engaging in these incredibly, unrealistically grotesque orgies involving blatantly illegal behavior. it's like some kind of mra fantasy.

the map and the territory was a *great* book though. he's not without talent.

Worth its Goncourt in gold, I agree.

Anyway, part of the reason Serotonin is so yawnsomely abhorrent is because he’d already written the Great French Incel Novel: Extension du domaine de la lutte.

They're all incel novels tbf

i mean, kind of. the protagonists are thoroughly repellent losers who sleep with young, beautiful women. you know, it's high literature. plus ca change.

i didn't really mean that as a criticism

the map and the territory is good because it is about contemporary art as an exhausted milieu, which feels perfunctory and almost inimical to the idea of inspiration, something like the opposite of what "art" is "supposed" to be about.

that's what he is good at writing about -- the west as a zombieworld

the corona quote is hilarious

yes, i don't think it's necessarily satire per se, but most of his fiction draws out the consequences of the experience of modern capitalism within a very circumscribed social group (bourgie white French men getting older as he gets older) - the stuff he's good at imo. he's largely terrible at the world beyond that group but i'm increasingly sure that's because he doesn't care about it.

no shit

god, is there a less promising pitch for a novelist on earth

"rich white guy writing about rich white guys like him" surely there's plenty of that on earth

it's insightful and sometimes funny on what scumbags that group is and how much they're a product of the system that produces them

sorry to unload maybe his writing is good but nothing could possibly make me interested

i mean i don't think it's a badge of honour but Extension... is a sharp portrait of incelism years before that word was coined

i'm not really interested myself any more, the Onion bit wins quoted upthread seems more like his steez nowadays

He wasn’t always rich tbf.

what is this incel shit? His characters fuck. What am I missing?

Not so much in Extension, which splits the world into alpha males and beta cucks in all but name.

Besides, it’s not as though the incel worldview were bereft of suitably unrealistic erotic fantasies.

But Houellebecq isn't an incel either

I have not read Extension

Submission, Whatever, Serotonin, Elementary Particles... those guys stay busy iirc... they're also as someone said upthread the same guy m/l

His mother's kind of hilarious.

Very