Houellebecq writes about the disappointment, sadness, loneliness, anguish, terror, boredom, and despair imposed by a culture unfit for human habitation. He exposes the freedom con pedalled since the sixties and defended in the name of progress. He summons up a diseased world, leaving the reader repelled and unsettled, but also relieved that at last the truth is told. He does not raise false hopes, but presents his characters in extremis within the collapsing culture, their humanity no longer capable of extending into the available space. But all the while there is an implicit comparison of an unexpected kind: that something better is possible—something that may once have existed, perhaps a memory deep in the recesses of the reader’s mind.
Here is my review of Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory.
This may be where Europe is heading.
Peddlers on bicycles? Copy-editors on vacation?
ReplyDeleteCopyeditors — I was one for many years — I fear are an endangered species.
ReplyDelete