Since there isn’t a literature forum here I’ll have to use this place to discuss the latest novel by ‘controversial’ French author Michel Houellebecq. He first became a name back in the late 90s with his ‘Camus for the information age’ novel Whatever which is a reworking of L’etranger from the point of view of a highly depressed IT systems engineer. He followed that up with Atomised which is a hilarious and sombre novel charting the lives of two half brothers, Bruno and Michel, throughout the second half of the 20th century. The book ‘was not so much published as detonated on the streets of Paris’ and earned him a major writing accolade. It is an amazing book if just for the density of the prose and the broadness of the themes.
He then published a book of essays which I’ve not read (mainly because my French isn’t good enough) and a biography of HP Lovecraft which I plan to ask for from my grandmother for Christmas (she sees the value of owning books, which is lucky for me).
Platform brought a different kind of fame. Houellebecq’s protagonist falls in love with a woman and they set up a series of third world ‘sex tourism’ holiday destinations and eventually the woman is killed in a Islamist terrorist attack in Bali (the novel was published prior to the first of the Bali bombings, spookily). By the end of the novel the protagonist (also called Michel) is saying things like ‘every time I hear about someone being gunned down in the Gaza strip I get a small glimmer of satisfaction at the thought of there being one less Muslim in the world’. Houellebecq was charged but acquitted of inciting religious hatred.
His latest novel, called The possibility of an Island is of a different sort. I’ve not read it yet (not available here until next June, apparently) but I’ve read reviews and from what I gather it’s about a world where people are born at 18 and die at 50 but everyone is cloned and so effectively lives forever. The story is told through the memoirs of Daniel-1 (set about 10 years in advance of the present) and the reflections on those memoirs of Daniel-24 and -25 some 2000 years in the future.