Houellebecq on Trump

[Mark Thibodeau]

I've read Platform, The Elementary Particles, The Map and the
Territory and Submission as part of my promise to myself to read at
least one French language novel per year in the original language.

Platform was... okay. Not great.

The Elementary Particles was excellent, perhaps the best novel I read
that entire year, and very memorable with some bon mots and ideas that
stay with me still. It's a minor masterpiece, and a semi-nihilistic
tour de force, not quite on the level of Celine, but still formidable.

The Map and the Territory was an entertaining PoMo potboiler with some
interesting things to say about the mounting failures and increasingly
depressurized spiritual milieu of late capitalist liberal democracy,
in particular as it pertains to the increasing popularity of
euthanasia, not just for unbearable physical pain at the end of the
arc of physical decline, but also for the ennui brought about by
accelerating civilizational alienation and anomie. It was genuinely
sad in parts, and I certainly don't regret having read it.

I read Submission - MH's novel imagining Europe's relatively bloodless
conquer by a sort of kinder, gentler, "Reform" version of Islam -
immediately after reading Joris-Karl Huysmans' Satanist novel, La-Bas
(Down There) because Submission is, in part, an homage to La-Bas, in
that there is a significant sub-plot involving the main character
conducting research into the life and work of Huysmans, just as the
main character of La-Bas is writing a study of notorious child
torturing serial killer (and Joan of Arc's right hand man) Gilles de
Rais. If you know a bit about Huysmans' late-life conversion to
Catholicism, you can generally suss out the use MH makes of it in
relation to the book's core project. Submission is not quite as
impressive as The Elementary Particles, but it's quite good, and
certainly isn't the kind of book you would expect a slobbering
Islamophobic hate-monger to write.

I'll happily read his next novel.

As for this Harper's editorial... I'd call it a bad joke if it hadn't
made me laugh so damn hard.

I bet he was smirking from the moment he hit "send" on the email to
the moment he submitted the electronic payment into his online bank's
checking account.

Cheers!
Yer old pal Jerky


On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 9:50 AM Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> When I started reading one of Houllebecq’s novels, I was impressed, but by halfway in, I had lost interest, and it ended up going nowhere. It was a waste of time.  I won’t be reading him again.
>
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>
> > On Dec 18, 2018, at 9:13 AM, Jemmy Bloocher <jbloocher at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Houllebecq makes me seethe. I wish I could express how much or the
> > particulars of why. But did he have to mention Switzerland. So many hold
> > Switzerland in such high esteem (notably I remember reading Alain de Boton
> > waxing lyrical about the wonders of Switzerland in a Guardian article years
> > ago - I should find a link), but I just don't understand why. It makes no
> > sense to me. It works on paper, just not in reality (and I have spent a lot
> > of time in Switzerland). I shall have to revisit this and justify my
> > raging. Thanks for the link Thomas.
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 1:26 PM Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> This may be of interest to some:
> >>
> >>
> >> https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/donald-trump-is-a-good-president/
> >>
> >> --
> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l