
	Where results make sense

Topic: Houellebecq

In the News (Mon 13 Feb 12)

EXECUTIVE POWER

Iran

ANALYSIS

Pakistan

Family compact

	Michel Houellebecq - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Michel Houellebecq (pronounced [miˈʃɛl wɛlˈbɛk]) (real name Michel Thomas), born 26 February 1958, on the French island of Réunion is a controversial, award-winning French novelist.
		Houellebecq worked as computer administrator in Paris before he became the so-called "pop star of the single generation".
		It is a romance, told mostly in the first-person by an aging male arts administrator, with many sex scenes and an approbation of prostitution and sex tourism.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Michel_Houellebecq (897 words)

	Review \| Platform by Michel Houellebecq (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Houellebecq's work assumes a posture of concrete self-autonomy when, in fact, the ideological call of the day is for an ever expanding understanding of "conditioned reflexes" and "action theory." But Michel Houellebecq does not seem to be easily fooled by empty chatter and morally devious motives.
		Houellebecq's central, and thus most alluring, contribution to a true understanding of this day and age is his penetrating glance into the coldly calculative condition of modern man. Ours, he argues, is a time when true creativity and originality is suffocated by ideology.
		Houellebecq's contention seems to be that in a world devoid of transcendent values, people must continuously occupy themselves with menial tasks in order not to become suffocated by their latent emptiness.
	www.januarymagazine.com /crfiction/http://www.nefarious-tales.com/fiction/platform.html (2452 words)

	Review \| H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq
		Houellebecq's writing is lucid and unpretentious, free of theoretical poison and as objective as it is respectful of its chosen subject.
		Houellebecq's wit uncovers the delicate and often misunderstood balance that exists between an aversion to man as the source of insipid mass movements and destructive ideologies and the sanctity of the individual -- the perennial subject and fuel of literature.
		Houellebecq strengthens the core of his long essay by including portions of some of Lovecraft's letters where much is learned about the man without taking recourse in ostentatious interpretations of Lovecraft's inner being.
	www.januarymagazine.com /biography/lovecraft.html (1032 words)

	Guardian Unlimited \| Weekend \| Interview: Michel Houellebecq
		Houellebecq, unsurprisingly, is hardly present, even in his own documentary, though it's only fair to say that things didn't go quite as planned.
		Houellebecq is like the man you meet at a crossroads of great contradictory currents who hasn't made up his mind which path to take and who, moreover, is not going to make up his mind.
		Houellebecq was born in 1958 in La Réunion, a French colony off the coast of east Africa, parents divorced, a half sister somewhere along the way whom he doesn't see.
	www.guardian.co.uk /weekend/story/0,3605,782337,00.html (3002 words)

	The Elementary Particles (Atomised) - Michel Houellebecq
		Houellebecq is relentless in his attack -- until, that is, the bizarre, uplifting (?) conclusion that suggests a brighter future (of sorts).
		Houellebecq's characters are grateful for a declining interest in and ability to perform sexual acts as they age, but it doesn't come soon enough for readers.
		Houellebecq's dark philosophy, culminating in "the most radical of Djerzinski's proposals" (and radical it is), is, on a theoretical level, a bit tough to take.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/houelbqm/partelem.htm (3154 words)

	Le Provocateur
		Houellebecq answered the door in stocking feet, blinked at me with his sad brown eyes and ushered me into the living room.
		Houellebecq fell into a drunken stupor, his nodding head landing on his plate next to a smear of mayonnaise.
		After all, Houellebecq told a French magazine that Stalin "killed a lot of anarchists." His antipathy for democracy ("Liberty is equivalent to suffering," he said on French TV) has caused much hand-wringing among the intelligentsia.
	partners.nytimes.com /library/magazine/home/20000910mag-houellebecq.html (2936 words)

	Guardian Unlimited \| Archive Search
		Houellebecq answered the door in stockinged feet, blinked at me with his sad, brown eyes and ushered me into the living room.
		Houellebecq's book is an original work of art - ironic, intelligent and as airtight and elegant as a geometry proof.
		Houellebecq - who maintains an open marriage, frequents swingers' clubs and estimates that he sleeps with 25 women a year - said that he couldn't imagine anything nicer than 'having clitorises all over your body'.
	www.guardian.co.uk /Archive/Article/0,4273,4092945,00.html (2895 words)

	Houellebecq
		Houellebecq is the author of several controversial novels of ideas, including Atomised and Platform, which investigate the condition of contemporary life in a Western society where no-one believes in anything much any more.
		Houellebecq was charged – following complaints by France’s Human Rights League, the World Islamic League, and the mosques of Paris and Lyon – after a magazine interview he gave, in which he described Islam as “the stupidest religion”, and said the Koran was so badly written it made him “fall to the ground in despair”.
		He wrote in The Guardian that people need to give to Houellebecq their full support, that in his view this is just as important as The Satanic Verses case.
	www.adelaideinstitute.org /Dissenters/houellebecq.htm (2367 words)

	Guardian Unlimited Books \| Authors \| Houellebecq, Michel
		Graphic and lucid in style, Houellebecq tackles the dark side of the late-20th century: the descent of the west into an orgy of consumerism; the decline of Christianity; the destructive fallout of the swinging 60s.
		Michel Houellebecq is the literary equivalent of a rock star - rebellious, adored and reviled - and a multi-millionaire.
		Michel Houellebecq's most famous novel, Atomised, dropped like a bombshell on French leftwing intellectual society, which had thought of him as one of their own.
	books.guardian.co.uk /authors/author/0,5917,-183,00.html (586 words)

	The Observer \| Review \| Michel Houellebecq: Agent provocateur
		Houellebecq waves them away with his fag smoke and we start to talk about dogs, in particular, his faithful pet, a Pembroke corgi called Clement, who has been left behind in the author's home near Dublin.
		Houellebecq, thoroughly shaken by events, had temporarily sought refuge with his long-standing friend and translator, Gavin Bowd, in the tiny Scottish village of Crail.
		Houellebecq was genuinely hurt by Demonpion's depiction of his difficult and traumatic relationship with his mother.
	observer.guardian.co.uk /review/story/0,6903,1635239,00.html (1549 words)

	LA Weekly (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Houellebecq was unwilling to discuss it, saying only that he wasn’t convinced of “the opposition between human dignity and cloning,” pointing to twins as a natural manifestation of the phenomenon.
		Houellebecq’s novels are notorious for their explicit sex scenes and lovingly detailed descriptions of threesomes and orgies, most of which, we are led to believe, are based on the author’s own experiences.
		Houellebecq, who believes that shopping is an overlooked literary subject, had wandered up and down the aisles for almost half an hour, gazing at bottles of algae and tubs of protein powder like an anthropologist studying the artifacts of an extinct tribe.
	www.laweekly.com /ink/05/31/features-bernhard.php (4103 words)

	LRB \| Theo Tait : Gorilla with Mobile Phone (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Although the more sensational aspects are Houellebecq’s invention, this character shares a great deal of his mother’s biography: she too was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant lifestyle.
		Houellebecq’s father’s house provides the backdrop for these first few scenes, and his North African lodger the model for Aïcha, the narrator’s father’s young lover, whose brother has murdered the older man. This mixture of documentary detail and lurid fantasy is a recurring pattern in Houellebecq’s fiction.
		But Houellebecq’s novels also clearly and vituperatively blame his parents and their generation – the hippies and the soixante-huitards – for the sexual misery in which many of his characters live, and for all kinds of social ills besides.
	www.lrb.co.uk /v28/n03/tait01_.html (4248 words)

	Michel Houellebecq at opensource encyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Michel Houellebecq born on the 26th of February, 1958, on the French island of Réunion is a controversial, award-winning French novelist resident in Ireland and Lanzarote.
		Gaining fame with the novel Extension du domaine de la lutte in 1994, he won the 1998 Prix Décembre with his novel Les Particules Elementaires being an instant 'nihilistic classic' that the New York Times called a deeply repugnant read.
		Provocative French novelist Houellebecq (Platform, 2003, etc.) extends his social critique to embrace cult religions, aging, cloning and the apocalypse.
	www.wiki.tatet.com /Michel_Houellebecq.html (189 words)

	Michel Houellebecq H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life Reviewed by Rick Kleffel
		Houellebecq is so outrageously, brashly entertaining that he manages the very difficult feat of making you forget that Stephen King writes the introduction.
		Houellebecq, with the able help of translator Dorna Khazeni has fashioned an exegesis of Lovecraft and his work that is the equal of its subject.
		Houellebecq apprehends Lovecraft in terms of what he calls Lovecraft's "great texts", that is, the classic stories that caught our interest and corrupted us for life.
	trashotron.com /agony/reviews/2005/houellebecq-lovecraft.htm (863 words)

	The cult of France’s literary bad boy - [Sunday Herald]
		In his latest work, Houellebecq returns to many of the themes explored in his three previous novels – with his hero Daniel, a morally-exhausted 40-something stand-up comic, obsessed with sex, ageing and the emptiness of human experience in 21st-century Europe.
		Houellebecq, who attended a Raelian congress two years ago and posed for a photograph with Vorilhon, told Le Monde that he found the sect “well-adapted to modern times, to our leisure-based civilisation.
		Apart from his extraordinary journey into the madness of a sect, one of the book’s most interesting aspects concerns the dread of ageing, the pursuit of the eternal dream of youth, the frantic belief in the omnipotence of sex,” he said.
	www.sundayherald.com /51581 (738 words)

	Platform - Michel Houellebecq
		Houellebecq's chic petulance and abundant salaciousness become part and parcel of his philosophy.
		Houellebecq is good with the incidental events and characters -- co-workers, Valérie's colleague's marital diffuclties, French TV, politics, and culture, and much more.
		The story is a bit unevenly paced, and occasionally he seems to lash out without bothering to create an adequate foundation within the story; the anti-Muslim bits, in particular, aren't as coherently presented as one might wish (though Michel's indifference to their motives or the details of their lives and religion is, perhaps, realistic).
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/houelbqm/platform.htm (2709 words)

	Michel Houellebecq: A novelist's anti-'60s rant (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Houellebecq's "original concept" is that the 1960s were the beginning of the end for Western civilization.
		His main characters are the sons, by different fathers, of a proto-hippie whose utter selfishness and disregard for her offspring has permanently scarred them; as such, they are emblematic of a generation.
		When Houellebecq tries to link Michel's personal experiences and the cultural decline of the West with quantum physics and molecular biology, he becomes imprecise and grandiose.
	www.providencephoenix.com /archive/books/00/11/16/MICHEL.html (638 words)

	BBC NEWS \| Europe \| French author denies racial hatred
		Mr Houellebecq told the court that he felt contempt - not hatred - for Islam, and that it was nonsensical to call him an "anti-Muslim racist".
		Mr Houellebecq's lawyer, Emmanuel Pierrat, argues that the case effectively re-establishes the notion of blasphemy, despite the fact that France is a secular state and has no such law.
		Mr Houellebecq, who recently won the Impac literary prize, is used to the controversy - and the attendant publicity - arising from his frank and sometimes nihilistic novels.
	news.bbc.co.uk /2/hi/world/europe/2260922.stm (590 words)

	U-WIRE.com/BOOK REVIEW: Ups, downs in Houellebecq's strange, charmed particle world (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		On the other hand, his hedonistic worldview and the forces that shaped his consciousness and desires were common to an entire generation." While it is of course legitimate to view a character in relation to his or her society, 264 pages of unambiguous tell-rather-than-show is not only devastatingly boring, it is, paradoxically, not very enlightening.
		Houellebecq further evades adequate characterizations of the two men by assigning them pat philosophical summaries of everything from Kant to Huxley in lieu of giving them actual thoughts.
		While Houellebecq enthusiasts may claim that the unique cultural situation of France makes it difficult for readers of the translation to understand the novel's importance, such a justification has its limits.
	www.uwire.com /content/topae121500002.html (1070 words)

	"That Divine Hatred Of Life": Houellebecq On Lovecraft
		Houellebecq often does seem to be writing directly to HPL as King's description suggests, but the tone isn't so much one of infatuation or admiration as it is literal obsession.
		Houellebecq believes Lovecraft's view of the universe not only to be unmatched in its nihilistic clarity, he believes it to be unmatched in veracity (see the blunt chapter-opener: "The world stinks.").
		The obsession becomes personal when Houellebecq intimates that few, if any, share the nihilism necessary to gain a true depth of understanding of HPL and his work; presumably, since Houellebecq is attempting to convey that depth, he himself shares this rare nihilism (note the mirroring of Houellebecq and Lovecraft's likenesses on the cover art).
	www.contrasoma.com /writing/houellebecq.html (919 words)

	Michel Houellebecq (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Michel Houellebecq pronounced «Wellbeck») was born on the 26th of February, 1958, on the French island of Reunion.
		Michel Houellebecq is a bestseller and a troublemaker.
		Houellebecq is top of the list, but the Islam question has weakened his chances despite the fact that he has beaten every other book of the season by miles.
	www.houellebecq.info /english.php3 (2949 words)

	The Richmond Review, Book Review, Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
		Houellebecq has fuelled this putative 'debate' with a series of interviews in which he blames the 'suicide of the West' variously on global capitalism, new age flummery, contraception, gays, fls and women over forty.
		This is the fate of Houellebecq's characters: trapped in a world in which their desires (fruitlessly exaggerated or fatally debilitated) fail to match up to their need for society, for relationships with other, equally crippled, individuals.
		Houellebecq's narrative concerns two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, born into the ostensible liberation of a post-sixties, Americanised, sexual universe.
	www.richmondreview.co.uk /books/atomised.html (825 words)

	Michel Houellebecq - Books - New York Times
		Houellebecq's last two novels, "The Elementary Particles" and "Platform," both later published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, also dominated their fall season, in 1998 and 2001.
		Houellebecq is certainly not the cure to France's current mood of pessimism.
		Houellebecq blames this state of affairs on the 1968 baby boomer generation and its political correctness gone awry.
	www.nytimes.com /2005/09/10/books/10mich.html?ex=1284004800&en=6fa382e62b7854ee&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss (736 words)

	Amazon.com: H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life: Books: Michel Houellebecq,Stephen King (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Houellebecq asserts that Lovecraft's kindly, reclusive, poverty-stricken life was "exemplary" because it was integral to the vision of his work.
		Houellebecq demonstrates that fear was at the heart of their similar worldviews, not merely fascism, and that fear sharpened their work.
		Houellebecq's admiration of Lovecraft is evident from the first page: he discusses the man's life, his works, and their themes with a fervor usually reserved for a Proust or a Faulkner.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1932416188?v=glance (2945 words)

	R A I N T A X I o n l i n e Fall 2005 - Houellebecq on Lovecraft
		What Houellebecq detests in refried hippies and the veiled, violent inhabitants of Parisian suburbs is the same thing Lovecraft found in the Jazz Age flappers and multi-colored immigrants crowding the streets of Brooklyn.
		Houellebecq doesn’t achieve the parallel (and infinitely expanding) world of Lovecraft, but their methods (exposed in a wonderful stretch of Houellebecq’s Lovecraft entitled “Technical Assault”) are the same.
		That Houellebecq and Lovecraft have fully-embraced both purity and failure there’s no doubt; there’s only the question of whether these have been twined into art—and a lot to wonder about how far we should follow them.
	www.raintaxi.com /online/2005fall/houellebecq.shtml (696 words)

	Offensive, provocative, humorous. His work is all that, but don't ask Michel Houellebecq to discuss it.
		Houellebecq is well acquainted with the lingering cultural hangover of the '60s.
		Houellebecq, in several passages, criticizes the morality of Islam (being careful, though, to have Muslim speakers give the most damning opinions).
		For this offense, Houellebecq was brought to court by a number of Muslim groups in France under the charge of racial hatred.
	sfgate.com /cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/01/DDGEGD001V1.DTL (1516 words)

	The New Yorker: The Critics: Books (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Houellebecq’s novel—his second—was very French in its mixture of intellectuality and eroticism; it was reminiscent of Tournier in the evident pride it took in its own theoretical bone structure.
		Houellebecq’s wife was also enlisted, posing for the photographer in her underwear and offering a loyal quote of treasurable quality.
		If Houellebecq is, on the evidence of “The Elementary Particles,” the most potentially weighty French novelist to emerge since Tournier—and the wait has been long, and therefore overpraise understandable—his third novel, “Platform” (translated by Frank Wynne; Knopf; $25), opens with a nod in an earlier direction.
	www.newyorker.com /critics/books/?030707crbo_books (2765 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)