(In this essay, Michel Houellebecq follows an unusual path...)
In this essay, Michel Houellebecq follows an unusual path and pays tribute to Lovecraft for having put himself in the "absolute elsewhere" and makes a case for a vertiginous literature. Lovecraft, one of the masters of the fantastic, was a strange character as evidenced by these terrifying stories. A book not to be read without tranquilizers.
(Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common, b...)
Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common, but little else. In this bilious and darkly funny dissection of modern lives and loves, the brothers are symptomatic members of an atomised society.
(An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Part...)
An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel - part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence. Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties.
(Michel Renault is a human void. Following the death of th...)
Michel Renault is a human void. Following the death of the father he barely knew, he endures his civil ser-
vice job while eking out an existence of prepackaged pleasure, hollow friendships, TV dinners, and pornography. On a group holiday in Thailand, however, he meets the shyly compelling Valérie, who soon pursues an agenda that Michel himself could never have thought possible: his own humanization.
(A worldwide phenomenon and the most important French nove...)
A worldwide phenomenon and the most important French novelist since Camus, Michel Houellebecq now delivers his magnum opus - a tale of our present circumstances told from the future, when humanity as we know it has vanished.
(Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life and a ter...)
Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life and a terrible attitude, the anti-hero of this grim, funny novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague - the sexually-frustrated Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system.
(The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of ...)
The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time now delivers his magnum opus-
about art and money, love and friendship and death, fathers and sons.
(A controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny new nov...)
A controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny new novel from France's most famous literary figure Paris, 2022. François is bored. He's a middle-aged lecturer at the Sorbonne and an expert on J. K. Huysmans, the famous nineteenth-century "decadent" author. But François's own decadence is considerably smaller in scale.
(Michel Houellebecq's Serotonin is a scathing, frightening...)
Michel Houellebecq's Serotonin is a scathing, frightening, hilarious, raunchy, offensive, politically incorrect novel about the current state of Europe, Western civilization, and mankind in general.
Michel Houellebecq is a French author, filmmaker, and poet. He is also a former National Assembly computer programmer.
Background
Michel Houellebecq was born on February 26, 1956, in Saint-Pierre, Réunion, France, to Lucie Ceccaldi, a French doctor, and René Thomas, a ski instructor and mountain guide.
Houellebecq’s parents sent him to live with his maternal grandparents when he was an infant. At age five or six he was transferred to the care of his paternal grandmother, whose maiden name he later adopted. His body of work gives evidence that the abandonment by and continued absence of his parents, who divorced when he was young, deeply scarred him.
Education
At the boarding school he attended, Houellebecq became a well-read outcast. At 18, he enrolled in preparatory school. Though he studied the sciences, in which he excelled, Houellebecq was drawn to the company of writers in Paris and began to write poetry. In 1980, he took a degree in agronomy, a field in which he rapidly lost interest.
Houellebecq submitted some poems for publication in Nouvelle Revue de Paris, and they were accepted. His editor there, Michel Bulteau, encouraged him to write for a series Bulteau had initiated at Éditions le Rocher publishing house. As a result of this connection, Houellebecq wrote H.P. Lovecraft: contre le monde, contre la vie (1991; H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life), a biography and an appreciation of that American master of the macabre. The same year, Houellebecq published a collection of short prose meditations, Rester vivant: méthode (To Stay Alive: A Method), and his first book of poetry, La Poursuite du bonheur (The Pursuit of Happiness). In order to support himself in his nascent writing career, he worked as a computer programmer, a job that inspired his first novel; Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994; Whatever; film 1999) featured an unnamed computer technician. This book brought him a wider audience. He then published another volume of poetry, the bleak Le Sens du combat (1996; The Art of Struggle).
As his award reveals, Houellebecq’s dark perspective brought him many fans, but the author remained a figure of controversy for expressing publicly in interviews as well as in his works what some readers considered racist, sexist, and deeply cynical views. His later works include Lanzarote (2000; Lanzarote), an attack on the European vacation practices; Plateforme (2001; Platform), a consideration of sex tourism in which he drew a spiteful and savage portrait of his mother; and La Possibilité d’une île (2005; The Possibility of an Island, film 2008, directed by the author), a bleak futuristic tale about the implications and possibilities of reproduction by cloning. In 2008 Ennemis publics (Public Enemies) documented an exchange of opinions - via e-mail - between Houellebecq and French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy on a variety of subjects, including what they considered undeserved criticism.
Soumission (2015; Submission) was a dystopian work of speculative fiction in which France has become an Islamic state. The novel was published on the day of the attacks on the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had that week published an issue featuring a caricature of Houellebecq on the cover. His next novel, Sérotonine (2019: “Serotonin”), centres on a depressed agricultural engineer who moves to the countryside amid mounting social unrest. The work, which was highly critical of the European Union, was seen as prescient as it was published shortly after mass demonstrations that were driven by inequality in France.