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Oracle of DelphiMichel Houellebecq: nihilistic darling
May 4th 2006 23:17
Michel Houellebecq was born on the 26th of February, 1958, on the French island of Reunion. His father, a mountain guide, and his mother, an anesthesiologist, soon lost all interest in his existence. A half-sister was born four years later. At the age of six, Michel was given over to the care of his paternal grandmother, a communist, whose family name he later adopted. In France, he lived not far from Paris: first at Dicy (Yonne), then at Crecy-la-Chapelle. He attended boarding school at nearby Meaux for six years. Finally, he took preparatory courses prior to entering the French grande ecole system.
His grandmother died in 1978. In 1980, he obtained a degree in agricultural engineering, and, that same year, married the sister of a classmate. A long period of unemployment followed. His son, Etienne, was born in 1981. Four years later, he divorced his wife. Finally, a bout with depression led to several stays at a psychiatric facility. He eventually found employment at the French National Assembly as an administrative secretary.
Michel Houellebecq
The author's following novel, Platform, (2001), earned him a wider reputation. It is a romance, told mostly in the first-person by an ageing male arts-administrator, with many sex scenes and an approbation of prostitution and sex-tourism. Furthermore, the novel is bitterly condemnatory of Islam and the muslim faith, a view that provoked much controversy in France when the book was published and that landed the author in court defending a charge of inciting racial hatred.
Platform is my favourite of Houellebecq's novels. It depicts a drab, emotionally flat world in which ordinary workers exist like drones in a depressingly sterile, passionless environment of labs, offices, mass public transport systems, and studio apartments. Relationships are meaninglessly trivial and devoid of any real sentiment. Sounds fun right....
Out of this bleakness the novel tells a warped love story; that of Michel and Valerie, misanthropes who together form a chain of international hotels that cater exclusively to sex tourists.
Perverse as this may sound, in the novel's emotionally flat context, the pair's union is the only glimmer of transcendence. The ending of the novel is important for its nihilistic implications - but you'll have to read that for yourselves - i'm not going to give it away.
But basically, I like Houellebecq because he forces the reader to examine the type of world that we live lin , and that we are in the process of creating all the time. As Houellebecq would have you believe, a decadent and hedonisitc world and a world that is strangely absent of meaning and emotional reality.
Here's a quote from Houellbecq's first novel Atomised that I think represents his view of the world:
"That same evening he came across a photo taken of him at his old primary school, in Charny, and he began to weep. Seated at his desk, the child held a school book open in his hands. He was looking straight at the camera and smiling, spirited and full of joy, and what seemed incomprehensible was that this child was him. This child did his homework, learned his lessons earnestly, confidently. He was entering the world, discovering the world, and the world did not make him afraid. He was all ready to take his place in the society of men. All that, you could see it all in the child’s eyes... Time is a banal mystery, he tried to tell himself, and it was only natural. The light in his eyes went out, the joy and the confidence faded away."
Les particules élémentaires (Atomised)
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