11 cauac XI
wrote Lovecraft’s bio 91
94 Extension of the Battlefield
98 Elementary Particles, 300.000 sold
01 Platform
Frederic Beigbeder one evening not long ago popped a Moody Blues ballad into his CD player and saw Houellebecq burst into tears: ‘He started crying, crying. Finally he explained that at all the parties when he was 18, all the boys and girls slow-danced to this song, but he was alone and no one talked to him because he was ugly.. he loves pathetic – all his work is about being pathetic’.
mountain-guide father and an anesthesiologist mother, hippie parents, at 6 shipped off to a communist grandmother SW of Paris, 78 she died, frequently depressed, at 18 rejected for military service because of a morphine addiction, in 80 graduated from college with a degree in agricultural engineering, married sister of a classmate, had a son and 84 divorced, within a few years, he was unemployed, drinking heavily and in and out of mental hospitals, where he was treated for anxiety, poet in 80s, since 91 computer admin in French National Assembly, 98 wife Marie-Pierre, 99 moves to Ireland near Cork from Paris, plan to move to a house on an island off the SW coast of Ireland where there are more sheep than people, doesnt like to speak English, asocial, Jim Beam, 00 has recorded a CD of his poems and tours France with a rock band, is directing an erotic film for the Canal Plus network, maintains an open marriage, frequents swingers’ clubs, estimates that he sleeps with 25 women a year, has no idea where his parents are today – or even if they are alive.
infl: Baudelaire, Brave New World and Island by Aldous Huxley, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Kant, Auguste Comte, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Book of Kells, and… Pif le Chien (a comic strip)
‘pop star of the single generation’, ‘nihilist’, NY Times: ‘deeply repugnant read’, ‘France’s biggest literary sensation in 20 years’.
To 20-somethings, he’s a hero; to baby boomers, he’s a menace to society. He is also considered by turns a pornographer, a Stalinist, a racist, a sexist, a nihilist, a reactionary, a eugenicist and a homophobe.
Extension of the Battlefield — features a physically repellent software technician whose unrealistic obsession is to find a woman who will have sex with him. Instead of losing his virginity, he ends up losing his life in a car crash.
Elementary Particles — story of Bruno and Michel, a pair of half-brothers who are palmed off to grandparents at a tender age by irresponsible hippie parents. Bruno grows up to become a self-loathing, sex-obsessed psychiatric patient who, though ‘prepared to go to the ends of the earth’ for nubile flesh ‘wrapped in a miniskirt’, is rarely satisfied. He abandons the one woman who loves him, when she becomes a wheelchair-bound invalid. As for Michel, he becomes a chronically depressed molecular biologist who commits suicide off the Irish coast – but not without leaving a blueprint for establishing a new species of perfectly rational human clones, the only hope for saving mankind from self-destruction.
Houellebecq said that having money has changed his life in one crucial respect only: it has allowed him to escape ‘the nightmare’ of being an employee.
‘I don’t like to eat, I only like sex.’
‘We live in a world in which there are no more links. We’re just particles. It’s a simple metaphor.’
Marie-Pierre: ‘Michel’s not depressed. It’s the world that’s depressing.’