Michel Houellebecq: France's New Literary "Enfant Terrible" and Islamophobe

No problemo :-)

So, if I were to do a straw-poll, how many people have read this? How many would like to read these books?
As an aside: are these books available in Pakistan/India?

Naqsh: To be honest, I have never heard of this author or the books but I do feel motivated to read the second one - The Platform. I do have to say though that I may be biased from the quality of your reviews. I wish you had been more substantial in your critique of the first and third books.

GTL

#5 Posted by Naqshbandi

Naqshbandi sahib,

"if they wanted to they could ..... ". What "if they wanted to but could not ...?"

How long will it take you to get rid of this mindset? And you, sir, are whining about "Islamophobia"?


IMO, u are either distorting or misunderstanding Naqsh's comment.

I re-read your article - Since Atomized was the book that seems to have impressed you the mopst, can u provide some more detail on it? The premise, the characters etc?

Stuka,

I could but that would give too much away. The story in very brief terms follows the lives of two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel who are diametrically different characters: Michel is an intellectual and has almost no interest outside of his research; Bruno is a hedonist and has almost no interest outside of getting laid. The plot follows their lives from childhood to adulthood. All the themes I mentioned in my main review are discussed within their story.
I hope my review did not put you off! Here are substantial reviews of Atomised to help you:

Atomised
Michel Houellebecq
translated by Frank Wynne
Heinemann £12.99, pp379


How do you write engagingly about what is boring, disgusting, pointless? How do you keep a reader gripped by the description of a society which has fallen apart and for which you feel no affection or respect? It is an old problem, never satisfactorily resolved by Camus, nor by the 'new wave' of French novelists of the Seventies - nor in this book by a man hailed across the Continent as a new Camus.

Atomised is, however, that rare thing, a novel of ideas which comes close to working. It is destined to be a cult book, a reactionary blast at the permissive society and bogus spirituality, US consumerism and the break-up of the family. Houellebecq, an Irish-based Frenchman with an uncanny resemblance to A. N. Wilson, tells the story of two half-brothers, a molecular biologist called Michel and a sex-crazed bore, Bruno, as they struggle for meaning in the last years of the twentieth century.

On the page, this often means long and arid tracts of anti-erotic pornography - descriptions of relentless, joyless, pointless sex which are a real grind to read. Anyone who thinks book-reviewing is an easy trade should try getting through a hundred pages or so about unattractive middle-aged Frenchmen getting blow-jobs. Mingled with this is an almost equal quantity of philosophising, based on a good understanding of recent mathematical and physical science and a strong dose of anti-liberal, anti-enlightenment politics. By now it sounds, no doubt, like a book from hell, a practical joke created by a few bored ex-Pythons on holiday to satirise the state of the French novel.

But Atomised is far better than that. For a start, it has integrity. Houellebecq's disgust and horror is not feigned. He is making serious points about the grimmer outcomes of the sexual revolution, the despair of the first sexual revolutionaries as their bodies age and they find they have failed to invest in companionship, family and the dense web of non-sexual connections that keep us fully alive. And his denouement, in which Michel lays the foundations for a wave-theory based scientific breakthrough which destroys human individualism, indeed humanity, and replaces us with a new order of being - a more social species who have set aside the 'monstrous egoism, cruelty and anger' of humans - is a genuine page-turner. It is not unlike the best of Aldous Huxley, whom Houellebecq clearly admires.

Beyond that, however, there is a poised, sometimes very funny and self-confident tone: 'In earlier times, when bears were more common, perhaps masculinity served a particular function, but for centuries now men clearly served no useful purpose. For the most part, they assuaged their boredom playing squash, which was a lesser evil...' Though this is Michel thinking, Houellebecq's conceit is that the whole novel is produced by post-humans in tribute to our vanished species; presumably this sweepingly confident tone is theirs as well. So that's it: humanity is to disappear and will be replaced by cloned asexuals who sound exactly like a Parisian brasserie philosopher of pronounced conservative opinion. Don't say you haven't been warned.


And another reviewer in The Guardian (a left-wing British newspaper) says:


tomised
Michel Houellebecq, trs Frank Wynne
(Vintage, £6.99)
Buy it at a discount at BOL
The friends of Michel Houellebecq: an online introduction
Houellebecq interview

Not that many novels get chosen by me as Pick of the Week. After reading Atomised , the reasons for this become clear. For against it, the contemporary British novel, with a few, scattered exceptions, suddenly seems timid, bogus, and footling. Not to mention atrociously written. I was prodded into thinking this by a remark by Julian Barnes on the back cover: "a novel which hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits". He is right; although Atomised also makes you wonder if other, ordinary writers have the coordination even to do the Shake 'n' Vac, let alone hunt fictional rabbits.

Article continues
It tells the story of two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, both children of a libertine hippy mother who had as little as possible to do with their upbringing. Houellebecq's childhood was very similar to this; the two main characters can be seen as divergent yet related elements of his own self.

Michel Djerzinski is a diligent, brilliant scientist who gives up his job as a researcher working on decoding genomes or whatever in order "to think". As his superior puts it: "decoding DNA, pfff . . . you decode one gene, then another and another . . . it's like following a recipe. From time to time someone comes up with better equipment and they give him the Nobel Prize. It's a joke." From which you can decipher not only that Houellebecq's cynicism is sincere and well researched, but that he can be very funny indeed. (And, in passing, that the translation would appear to be first-rate.)

How can you not warm to a book that contains observations such as the following: "Some people live to be 70, sometimes 80 years old believing that there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to see reason." How can you fail to love a writer who creates a character who, filling in a questionnaire at the back of a supermarket magazine, is described thus: "the only three activities he could actually tick off were sitting, lying down and sleeping". Michel turns out to be a hero who rescues the human race from itself; his solution is a gauntlet Houellebecq throws down to all of us. You may not like it; you're not meant to.

Michel's half-brother, Bruno, is a more problematic individual; where Michel has virtually no sex drive at all, Bruno is obsessed, with the unfortunate twist that for long periods of his life, he doesn't get enough. He exposes himself to a girl in the class to which he teaches literature; he is sent to a mental institution (as was Houellebecq, if not for the same reason). He goes to a hippy holiday commune, the Lieu du Changement, and the vacuity of all New Age bullshit is brilliantly attacked. ("Tantric Zen, which combined vanity, mysticism, and frottage, flourished.") Bruno is the id to Michel's ego, if you want to use specious terms.

This is a bold and unsettling portrait of a society falling apart: the rage that both left and right, the piously religious as well as the humanists, have expressed towards Houellebecq is pretty much the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the glass. There is not too much doubt that Houellebecq is an unpleasant person. (We're no slouches in this regard, but France has a gift for producing nasty writers.) One does not want to examine his ideas on race too deeply, just yet. I would get this and read it before that particular time bomb explodes.

Stuka, at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I consider myself a rather good judge of literature and this book comes highly recommended by me. Give it a go!!

Entire Quran is based upon idolo-phobia.

I am yet to see a muslim who has got over this phobia.

I am yet to see a muslim who would love me because I love idolatory.

I am yet to see a muslims who would say that Mohammad did the wrong thing in prescribing the violence against idolators ns their idols.

I am yet to see a muslim who has got over the idolatory-phobia and can enter my temples with reverence towards my gods.

re. laddu:
"Those who refused were demoted to kafirs.
And were immediately despatched to Allah's hell.

Ludds, I wonder if you could provide some historical evidence of the above. Now, this is a sincere request; no need to postal on it.

re. laddu,
"I am yet to see a muslim who would love me because I love idolatory."

Now this is patently silly, you little piece of ... miThaee. See, it's a little like asking Creationists to love Evolutionists because of, and not inspite of their subcription to Darwin's theory.

I am yet to see a muslim who has got over the idolatory-phobia and can enter my temples with reverence towards my gods.

Dude, I don't think you understad the deal with idolatory. Or with the idea of the One-True God deal. It's all right. Most "believers" don't either. You'd do well to get your hands on, say, Karen Armstrong's History of God for some clues as to why them Moozlims (or Christians, for that matter) aren't about to do the puja thing before your idols.

(Besides, they have their own!) :-)

PM, agree with you fully in #25. Laddu seems to be saying something important to him, but unless he puts it more accurately, his arguments will not make sense.

About Karen Armstrong, what IS the deal with idolatory and the One-True God? And Karen Armstrong does not even accurately reflect the beliefs of most believers, what good is her opinion? Is it any better than the opinion of any other highhly educated lady, say, our zeena?