Nothing better than offering a controversial narrative to arouse curiosity and bring more readers closer to a work that, in the end, is worth its weight in gold.
Strategy or not, the point is that since that Michael Thomas, published his first novel with a prestigious publishing house but from elitist minorities, he already pulled his unstructured, acid and critical vision to stir consciences or viscera. With that narrative-bellicose mood, she little could imagine that she would end up opening up to readers from all spectrums. The sophistication in the background of a plot can end up being succulent for any reader if the form, the packaging, the most direct language allows access to that more intellectual field. Which is the same, knowing how to slide between a live action, a dose of hemlock. In the end, Michel peppered his work with controversial and harshly criticized books. Surely that means that his narrative awakens and stirs up the most critical soul of any reader.
Y Michel Houellebecq he achieves that balance in almost everything he sets out to tell. In the style of a Paul auster that he would scatter his imaginary among current novels, science fiction or essays. Comparing always arouses misgivings. And the truth is that the current, modern, exploratory narrative never traces identical paths between its most avant-garde creators. But you have to rely on something to establish the worth of an author. If for me Houellebecq distills essences of Auster at times, well that's how it stays...
His science fiction side is an aspect that I really like about this author. As well as Margaret Atwood offered in his novel The Maid a rich conscience-raising dystopia, Michel did the same with his recent "The possibility of an island", one of those stories that, over time, acquires the value it has, when times reach the forefront of thought creator that culminated in this novel. Otherwise, there is quite a lot to choose from in “Michel with an unpronounceable surname”, and here are my thoughts on it…
Top 3 recommended novels by Michel Houellebecq
Annihilation
The future is today. Only that this apocalyptic future with which the notion of the future has been adorned seems to besiege us from several sides. Viruses, overpopulation, climate change, biblical plagues and fools everywhere. We no longer need veiled messages from any prophet, shit is up to our knees. We are left with survival in search of dignity, posture so that whoever comes after with two fingers in front can extract something positive from our legacy. With this novel by Houellebecq it could be understood what we, humans, were about, without the need for Marx or Freud or Cervantes...
Year 2027. France is preparing for a presidential election that is very likely to be won by a TV star. The strong man behind this candidacy is the current Economy and Finance Minister, Bruno Juge, for whom Paul Raison, the protagonist of the novel, a taciturn and unbelieving man, works as an adviser.
Suddenly, strange threatening videos begin to appear on the internet – in one of which Minister Juge is guillotined – with enigmatic geometric symbols. And the violence goes from the virtual to the real world: the explosion of a freighter in A Coruña, an attack on a sperm bank in Denmark and the bloody attack on a migrant boat off the coast of Mallorca. Who is behind these facts? Anti-globalization groups? Fundamentalists? Satanists?
As Paul Raison investigates what is happening, their marital relationship breaks down and his father, a retired DGSI spy, suffers a stroke and is left paralyzed. The event leads to the reunion of Paul with his brothers: a Catholic sister and sympathizer of the extreme right married to an unemployed notary, and a tapestry restorer brother married to a second-rate journalist embittered and twisted fang. And besides, Paul will have to face a personal crisis when he is diagnosed with a serious illness...
Houellebecq orchestrates an ambitious total novel that is many things at once: a thriller with esoteric fringes, a work of political criticism, a stark family portrait and also an intimate and existential narrative about pain, death and love, which may be the only thing that can redeem us and save us.
A provocative and apocalyptic novel that, as usual in Houellebecq, will dazzle or shock. What is certain is that it will not leave anyone indifferent, because the author has the unusual virtue of shaking consciences.
The possibility of an island
Houellebecq's great foray into science fiction to end up bringing that external perspective to events in our real world. Between the noise of our routine, between the frenetic pace of life, alienation and the creators of opinion that think about us, it is always good to find books like The possibility of an island, a work that, although part of an absolutely Science Fiction environment , opens our minds towards an existential thought abstracted from our circumstances.
Because science fiction has a lot of that, of becoming a prism from which to see differently, a spaceship with which to see our world from the privileged vision of what is alien. By reading CiFi we become strangers to our world, and only from the outside can one objectively understand what happens inside. Daniel24 and Daniel25 are, as you can easily guess, clones. Its existence is infinite, immortality is an option.
But existence without limits has its bestial shortcomings. What sense can live forever if the counterpart is not valuing the moment? These clones are empty, nullified beings. Everything works in life thanks to its usual expiration date. The fleeting is desired, the ephemeral is yearned for, what can be lost is loved. Nothing more true than these extremely easy to understand axioms. Michel Houellebecq brings his sarcastic touch, a humor that resonates like an echo in an empty cosmos, a laugh like the din of all our vanities.
The two clones, 24 and 25, find the diaries of their primal self, the original, as it is named in the novel. The testimony of this finite being from which both clones left reaches them until they reactivate their spark of life, the one that ignites vigorously because it also anticipates their inescapable extinction. Doubts awaken feelings and emotions. Love and pleasure reappear, and then everything is called into question, even obsolete immortality.
The Map and the Territory
One of those disturbing current narratives for its exploration of the limits of fiction. Because what happens in this novel ends up meddling in the real world, in the circumstances of our world and in the very environment of an author who has become a victim of his own narrative machinations.
Jed Martin is an artist of the strange that ends up rising to the greatest of successes from nowhere in an inconsequential work. The excuse of his success serves to delve into the vicissitudes of Jed himself, a particular relationship with his father that ends up floating as a constant in the whole of the novel, the recreation of the changing world from his humble environment to his universe of wealth, his encounters and disagreements with Olga, that love in the shadows since he was nobody, the nature and denaturalization of art.
Many rich nuances full of humor and stridency. When Jed meets Michel Houellebecq, he proposes to work with him and they become close friends. So when the writer is murdered, Jed ends up getting involved in the motives of the crime in a bewildering investigation.
Other recommended books by Michel Houellebecq…
Elementary particles
The elementary thing is the contradiction. And the truth written black on white is the only channel, the most faithful testimony of the great lie that addresses so many aspects of our world.
Focused on the composition of today's France and its decision-making spheres of power, the plot advances with a humorous proposal on a crude, disturbing surrealism, a resource that Houellebecq masterfully masters to offer us a constant feeling of estrangement, of rethinking axioms and more inviting to suspicion than to criticism.
The characters of Michel and Bruno, brothers and antagonists in terms of their vision of the world and their dedication to the ascetic and the hedonistic, respectively, end up composing a canvas on extremisms, philias and phobias, all those shades without the possibility of gray that they end up composing the vital choices.
Left to their own devices by their mother, the siblings are a representation of that polarized individual on which one side and the other of society can be built (in this case focusing on France but being able to extrapolate to any place in the world)
A novel with futuristic touches with which at times you find yourself laughing at a grotesque, until immediately afterwards you perceive that you yourself also join in on that grotesque.
Interventions
The texts of this book, letters, interviews or articles, appeared from 1992 in various publications, from the NRF to Paris Match, 20 Ans or Les Inrockuptibles. They were no longer available. They talk about architecture, philosophy, parties, feminism, the rehabilitation of the French, reactionary and phallic male, the stupidity of Jacques Prévert or even the indigestible Alain Robbe-Grillet… A noisy journey that draws a reflection of coherence and sharp demand.
The result is relentless: «We had a lot of fun, but the party is over. Literature, on the other hand, continues. It goes through hollow periods, but then it resurfaces.” "Houellebecq's struggles are fundamental, necessary, they give a vision of art and society" (DNA). «Michel Houellebecq is sometimes funny, often intelligent, always definitive» (Paulin Césari, Le Figaro). "It is essential to read it" (Les Inrockuptibles).
More interventions
More than half of the texts in this book (letters, interviews or articles) were translated into Spanish for the first time in 2011, and were published in this same collection under the title Interventions. The present edition, with the incorporation of the new texts, continues with the journey of coherence and acute demand, of an implacable invoice, drawn then.
As Michel Houellebecq himself recounts: «Although I do not claim to be a committed artist, in these texts I have endeavored to persuade my readers of the validity of my points of view: rarely on the political level, mostly on social issues, occasionally from time to time on a literary level.
These are my last interventions. I do not promise to stop thinking at all, but I do promise to at least stop communicating my thoughts and opinions to the public, except in cases of grave moral urgency: for example, if euthanasia were to be legalized [in France] – I don't think there will be others, in the time I have left to live. I have tried to arrange these interventions in chronological order, to the extent that I have been able to remember the dates. The existence, at least apparent, of time has always been a great bother to me; but the habit of seeing things in these terms has developed. For once, I tolerate it."
More interventions is an essential compendium to delve into the thought of one of the most important writers of our time.
Good information and very complete.
Houellebecq is among my favorites. One can imagine a future like the one in "The Possibility of an Island" and a story of the present like the one told in "Expanding the Battlefield."
Thank you!!
Thank you very much, Rodrigo!