[lit-ideas] More on Houellebecq

Here's something about his latest novel. -EY

[extract of http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/news/article306869.ece]

Secrecy surrounding the most talked about book in France was shattered acrimoniously by a critic who claimed to have found a review copy abandoned on a Paris park bench.

The book is a science fiction novel, with sex, violence and pessimistic philosophy, to be published on the last day of this month by Michel Houellebecq, the enfant terrible of modern French writing.

His last novel, Platform, published just before the 9/11 attacks in the United States, described an Islamist terrorist assault on the decadent West. Houellebecq caused indignation - and a court case, which he won - when he described Islam in an interview as the "stupidest of all religions". Only a handful of advance copies of his new novel have been issued to allegedly "friendly" critics by the publishers, Fayard.

Angelo Rinaldi, literary editor of Le Figaro, and a member of the Académie Française, which polices the French language, was not among the charmed circle. Imagine his surprise, he told his readers yesterday, when he found a "much-thumbed, greasy" and annotated review copy on a park bench in Square du Temple in eastern Paris.

M. Rinaldi read the book and wrote a stinking review in his column in Le Figaro. He described La possibilité d'une Ile" (The Possibility of an Island) - a 488-page description of a planet populated by cloned neo-humans - as "ridiculous" and a "damp squib". Literary controversy is as much a part of a traditional August in France as sun-cream and chilled white wine.

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http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,371516,00.html
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ'S NEW NOVEL

Can Humans Survive Without Sex?

By Romain Leick

Michel Houellebecq is back. In his new book "The Possibility of an Island," he tells a virtuoso tale of sex, science fiction and sect madness, delivering what is bound to be the hit of the fall literary season -- and ponders just how important sex drive is to the human condition.

It doesn't take him long to get to his anatomical point; it only takes three pages and about 50 lines for the vagina to make its first appearance. Michel Houellebecq, the sharp-tongued observer of current reality, the harbinger of middle-class misery, the dispassionate witness to the decline of postmodern society, is in his obsessive element: the female gender as the focal point of a life that is otherwise nothing but an arduous journey that offers no particularly convincing reason to be completed.

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