I Can't Get Close to Michel Houellebecq

Granta published part of Houellebecq's Benoît. Unfortunately, I am too broke to get past the paywall.

I do like the opening:

I’m getting old, and of course my friends are getting old, and there are now quite a few people whose death I’m afraid to wake up to, but Benoît wasn’t one of them. I just didn’t see it coming. The news of his death plunged me into a state of horrified shock, and deep down I still can’t really believe it. I’m often about to call him to ask if he wants to do something together, visit a monument, eat in a restaurant, see a show, before reality catches up with me. This must be what the shrinks call denial. It’s strange because I don’t go in much for denial; I usually take tragic news on the chin, without my mind assembling the slightest escape. In the end, I don’t think you ever come to terms with the death of someone you love all at once; you have to come to terms with it over and over again, sometimes many times. The last people I had to mourn died after long illnesses, and you gradually resign yourself to it with each visit to the hospital. But with a sudden death it’s afterwards that you have to kill them inside yourself, and even then you can only kill them little by little.

Not constrained by a paywall is Jeffrey Meyers's Michel Houellebecq: power and perversity ( The Article).

Michel Houellebecq (pronounced “Welbeck”), born in 1956 on the French island colony of Réunion in the Indian Ocean*, is the wildly popular star and caustic celebrity of contemporary French literature.  His novel Submission (2015) has sold an astonishing 950,000 copies; Sérotonine (2019) sold 450,000.  He portrays the alienation and anger that many readers feel but can’t express.  Rancorous, misanthropic and propelled by savage indignation, he goes out of his way to shock readers and create an unpleasant persona.  His best novel, Platform (2001), is a forum for his outrageous yet perversely appealing ideas.  Anglo-American critics in the Guardian and the New York Times have offered moralistic and politically correct condemnations, but it is surely wrong to equate the fictional “Michel” with the author of this impressive novel.

Unlike narcissistic and superficial contemporary novelists, Houellebecq (whom I shall call MH) boldly and seriously questions the human condition.  He has a similarly bleak vision to Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett.  Platform combines ecstatic descriptions of sex with savage satire on modern life.  MH doesn’t like the world he lives in and doesn’t believe in the humane values of western civilisation.  He thinks “man is clearly not intended to be happy” and that “ultimately everyone returns to his original nothingness.”  Platform is a brilliant, powerful, sometimes toxic mixture of Louis Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night with the sexual athletes in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.  MH transforms the essence of these books into his own disturbed and distressing vision.

That is quite a combination. I have read Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and  Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The former made more sense to me than the latter; I have never quite understood's D.H. Lawrence. I missed out several opportunities to read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer when I was younger; getting no closer to him than the movie Henry and June. All-in-all, I get the sense of grimy reality meets a lot of sex. Moistly, I like the idea of upsetting American thinking.

My people do not go out in the world as tourists, although I have a friend who has gone on cruises, but none of us think of going to Thailand.

The travel brochures advertise warm welcoming friendly people who are actually quite hostile and see tourists “purely as wallets on legs.”  MH observes, “the great thing about Discovery Tours: you can subject tourists to horrible conditions.”  In an ecological-paradise resort the guests’ excrement flows straight from a hole in the floor into the river where the local people bathe and do laundry.  Instead of breeding tolerance, travel reinforces or creates racial prejudice.  Women on holiday crave sexual adventures and are drawn to the more “laid-back and virile” dark races.  MH wittily observes, “white people want to be tanned and to dance like Negroes; blacks want to lighten their skin and straighten their hair. . . . All humanity instinctively tends toward miscegenation.”

There you go with what I think is an exotic writer, one who might have something to teach us Americans.

sch 5/10