Houellebecq on TV

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

In contrary to Pynchon's media absence, Houellebecq, whose first 
artistic try was a movie, always gave the media what they wanted. About 
a month ago the TV station 'Arte' showed a strange movie called 'The 
Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq' which turned out to be rather funny. 
My favorite scene is that where one of the criminals, who actually had a 
look on Houllebecq's first book - the Lovecraft essay -,  starts an 
argument with his victim and always speaks of the American author not as 
Lovecraft yet as 'Warcraft' and later also as 'Lord Warcraft' ... I 
don't have the impression that Houllebecq is revealing by his media 
presence anything he doesn't want to. Perhaps his strategy to feed the 
media with more than they can put into their simple patterns, works, 
when it comes to keeping up artistic integrity, even better than 
Pynchon's staying out of the public sphere completely. Hope that 
Houllebecq will soon publish a new novel. His last one - The Map and the 
Territory - was simply great.

Movie trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Ap1g83Dg4

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l