American Writer wonders at the dregs of French Literature!
Magdalena Miecznicka provides… The Reader can’t exactly call it gush, or even mistaken adoration, but it resembles in an odd way the Edward Luce interview of Henry Kissinger! Although Magdalena Miecznicka offers a sophisticated, wary knowledge of her subject!
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He’s a great admirer of Christopher Lasch, an American historian who argued that modern global elites have more in common with each other than the poorer people from their own countries. “He was ahead of his time,” says Houellebecq. These elites are harder to dismantle than the nobility, he muses. “Nobility had nothing to explain their right to stay in power, apart from their birth. Contemporary elites claim intellectual and moral superiority.”
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Here is another view of Lasch, or perhaps just an endorsement of Houellebecq’s position? Although Horkheimer, Adorno & Marcuse might appear odd company for Houellebecq?
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https://www.ft.com/content/73338e2e-331a-4be3-88d4-a0d9e4216c8a
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Headline: Michel Houellebecq: Brexit, sex tapes and my tears for France
Sub-headline : The controversial French novelist discusses African immigration, his new novel and laments the death of the country of his rural childhood
Editor: the first paragraphs of Will Lloyd’s what to name it? The marriage of literature to a Houellebecqian politics of decline, despair, held together by alcohol and literary cachet? The American Reader might think of once ascendant Charles Bukowski?
So here is Michel Houellebecq. The author of eight novels, several volumes of poetry and innumerable controversies stumbles out of the first day of autumn rain in Paris towards this down-at-heel brasserie. He looks rather dazed.
And he can’t really walk. Instead he moves with a slow, pained shuffle. His knees incline towards the ground; his back bends forwards, as if all of French, all of western civilisation, were carried on his narrow shoulders. Depending on your view, Houellebecq, 68, is either a grotesque literary provocateur or the last novelist in Europe who has anything interesting left to say about the way we live now.
In France Houellebecq is revered as a prophet and condemned as a racist. Print runs for his novels run into the hundreds of thousands here, and his pronouncements, particularly about Islam, have led to court prosecutions, media frenzies and interventions from presidents and prime ministers.
He began his career as a morbid, scatological literary shock jock with the 1994 novel Extension du domaine de la lutte (translated into English as Whatever), but over the decades Houellebecq’s writing has taken on a broader social dimension. In later works, like the 2016 novel Submission (hailed in different ways by the former French president François Hollande and the leader of the National Rally, Marine Le Pen) and Serotonin (2019), the decline of France is mercilessly analysed in an atmosphere of sly, sombre resignation.
While Houellebecq’s prose can be workmanlike, his ability to identify the maximum points of pain beneath the surfaces of everyday life is not. There is no British equivalent to what Houellebecq has become: the subversive and anguished chronicler of a nation in free fall. When we meet, France has not had a functioning government for two months. Le Pen’s hard right is on the rise. The political centre has been crushed. Predictions of civil conflict fill the air.
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The valuable thing that Will Lloyd offers is quick capsule reviews of five books by Houellebecq.
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So much more to be said!
American Writer
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