RealityStudio.org

Any thoughts on the crazy wee French swine at all?

G.

i liked PLATFORM. i read the new one and found it so so.

You just should read him. A good one to start with is 'Lanzarote', as it is very short, so it gives you a good taste. Actually I have only got around to Lanzarote and Atomised. I have his first book, 'Whatever', sitting there on the pile still.

I think Will Self said of him, 'He's just a little guy who can't get laid'- or some such- and he had a bit of a point, but he is much, much more than just that. If you can put up with Burroughs burbling on and on about shagging young boys or whatever, then you will not mind Houellebecqs musings on women and sex, which often reveal his rather bitter side, but are also frequently very funny.

I just think he is really damn good. He really reflects the mood of these times better than anyone else I can think of. He is very, very funny and clever. If there is anyone else around at all like him I want to hear about them.

Here are the first 2 or 3 pages of 'Lanzarote':
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/ex ... 009944836X

my favorite contemporary, french writer is Pierre Merot. they say he is like Houellebecq but funnier. i agree that he's funnier.

I've read Houellebecq's books, though I didn't think his last, The Possibility of an Island was too hot - the nasty Islamic parody riffs and racism were the man tiring of himself and mocking himself and his past 'controversies' and, well, who cares? There's always some interesting truths in his books, though, even if he is a bit nutty. Throwaway soundbite insane foolosophy.

G.

i found ISLAND a lot of work to finish, and confusing, altho there were parts that i thought quite beautiful. seemed to me overall that he'd bitten off a bit more than he could chew. sci fi to lit is no easy task.

this might be a good spot to share what we're all reading. for me it's HORROR PANEGYRIC by our own keith seward/supervert/realitystudio. what follows keith's outstanding piece are chapters of the three LORD HORROR novels by david britton & michael butterworth. the first one has whetted my appetite for the next. i highly recommend this book already. if you're interested in cutting edge fiction, you must have it.

re what we are currently reading - i'm halfway through journey to the end of the night by Celine. Started it a few years ago and couldn't get into it but i'm enjoying it this time. Although i sometimes feel like slapping him Bogart-style and telling him to stop whining. Will probably move on to nova express, another one i've struggled with in the past. I recently re-read and enjoyed the wild boys and i'm feeling like i can get a lot more out of the cut-up stuff than i used to.

Yes, I do like and dislike Houellebecq too. Arguably the last book was slightly too "something" but it still had it. As far as I am concerned no one else has better captured that percieved black comical state of European white middle aged men, desolute yet horny, post-liberal etc that supposedly existed somewhere along the late 1990s and early 2000s. My favorite statement of his was that he had lost several teeth due to neglecting his dental hygene whilst writing the last book. If it is true or not is irrelevant. What I want to know though is where is he now, what is he working on now?

Re: what I am reading now. I just became a father for the first time (a month ago) and this coincided with me finally getting a "real" job -both of which have conspired to make reading a luxury for me (whereas before I could just sit and read all day long at work, ha ha ha). I am however struggling to finnish the Miracle at the Vistula (academic history book about Soviet invasion of Poland 1920, my Polish mother-in-law gave it to me because I studied history 10 years ago), Henry Millers' previously unpublished book on DH Lawrence "The World of Lawrence" (saw it at the Calver book shop...), as well as occasional re-readings of Dostoevesky (The Book of the Dead), Gogol (short stories), Celine (Death on Credit (trying to figure out if it's different translation from version entitled 'Death on installment plan' that I read ages ago, so far I am undecided) and a few others.

Aha.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articl ... 49,00.html

Wow. It's enough to make you believe in the Oedipus Complex.

And I thought Eminem was bad with his rampant whambamnothankyoumammaslammin! This might explain Houellebecq's (love trying to spell that right) creepy attitude towards women a bit though...

G.

WSB always talked about how writing can put you in real danger. I took from this that he meant vital, especially good and important writing. Of course what kind of 'danger' he was getting at exactly is open to interpretation and discussion, yet I think this is one of the great strengths of Houellebecq’s writing, the way he obviously draws from his own life in such an extraordinarily candid and wonderfully shocking and perhaps 'dangerous' way, and it is almost more proof to me of his stature as a writer that his writing is duly creating extreme repercussions for him. I just finished his first book, 'Whatever', and I think he explores his own self and experiences with just as much intensity and frightening candour as the way he writes about his mother in 'Atomised'.

Great writer. Like Burroughs, in many ways seriously unpleasant, but you sense it couldn't be otherwise, and in the end you sense they are both simply being more honest than most writers, and getting in deeper, which to me redeems them, and- combined with their great thinking on the connections between the personal and the societal- helps make them great.

I would have to say I agree with the above post. He says what he wants and means, and says it mean, be it about wanting to fuck teenage girls or hating Muslims, and that's a rare thing these careerist daze. And you know a person's pathology or fetish only becomes distasteful when you don't share it - otherwise it's hot and erotic. I just think the man's a really uneven writer, is all. But there was a few paragraphs in Island about a woman hitting middle age that were among the most disturbing, and absolutely truthful, things I have ever read in the English language. Even if the truth hurts we need to hear more of it to understand ourselves. Of course, it's his truth, and we may not entirely share or see it (he obviously has a distaste for middle aged women cos he has a hard-on for young girls), but the articulation of it is still important nonetheless, if only to show us what we don't believe or want to know about, to help define our own experiential and existential parameters.

G.

I liked his writeup on Lovecraft that I read maybe 3 years ago. He's not as much of a scholar on HPL as say, Joshi, but he does a bang-up job. As far as his own work/ideas, he's a lot better than Foucault in my book

Well, I read the HPL book too but did not really think it was much, sure interesting from pointofview of HPL, naturally, but as far as Houellebecq goes it did not really tell me much...you know, reading about it initially I took it be one of those classical cases of a writer writing about another writer, yet the book is about the author himself, and the idea follows from there that it could be significant to the interpretating H - I guess inadvertedly it was interestinga s it indeed shows that he isn't a great HPL scholar...does that make sense?

(This reminds me that I still haven't read (i.e. managed to track down) Louis Ferdinand Celine's medical doctors thesis on Semmelweiss, it's supposed to be modestly revealing about the auhor and his methods of truth - just as H's, it's said to be full of gross facual mistakes and moreover written in a narrative which is closer to fiction than formal academic language - anyone read it?)