Thursday, July 09, 2020

Appreciation …

… The Prophetic Pessimism of Michel Houellebecq – Quadrant Online. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I have dwelt on these two pages of text not because they are of crucial importance or significance in Houellebecq’s work, but simply because they exemplify his manner of exposing the spiritual emptiness of so many people’s lives in the Western world: an emptiness which, when it affects a large proportion of the population including, or especially, the most highly educated, will render it unfit to meet the challenge of countries or civilisations that actually retain firm beliefs, however absurd or retrograde they may be from an abstract intellectual point of view. And this is to disregard the constant subliminal misery than an absence of belief in anything causes people, once the raw struggle for survival has been won. There are hundreds of pages of observations such as those in Lanzarote in Houellebecq’s books, and it is for them that I, at any rate, read him. He shows us what is before our face but we preferred not to see.
I have read a couple of Houllebecq’s novel and reviewed one. These. In his novels has always struck me as reportage and not at all erotic, let alone pornographic.

No comments:

Post a Comment