Cry me an Island
Baudelaire, Pascal and Dostoevsky were "three simultaneous shocks at 15", though Pascal and Dostoevsky believe "life's an error but God exists. For me, life's a mistake, and God doesn't exist". While allusions to Camus pepper his work, he believes the absurdist Ionesco's novel Solitaire is "more beautiful than L'Etranger". At 18 he began to read about atomic physics and genetics. "What I was looking for in science was certainty."
He graduated with a degree in agronomy in 1980 but had spells of unemployment and, after divorce from his first wife (he has one son), was treated for depression. He became a computer programmer at the French parliament in 1991, writing novels and poetry in his spare time. But he left after his second marriage, to Marie-Pierre Gauthier in 1998, and moved to Ireland.
The spark for Platform, which appears to present sex tourism as an ideal solution for rich, clapped-out westerners and locals with nothing to sell but their bodies, was a package tour to Thailand. "Day 1, Day 2 . . . Everything is so well foreseen," he says.
But in Platform, Islamic terrorists lay waste to a Thai resort. It was later seen as uncannily prescient of the Bali bombing of October 2002.
"It wasn't that difficult to predict," he says. "You just need to go to these places to see there's a problem developing", though he thinks everybody but Islamists "is profiting from it". He says the remarks for which he was tried were part of a dismissal of monotheistic religion. "I've too much contempt for religions to talk about them. It's a total waste of time."
He writes of Lovecraft's "obsessive racism", a charge some critics level at him, too. "I'm interested in subjects more important than race, not details of colour or skin," he says. "The biological fate of mankind, the struggle against ageing, the development of intelligence through interconnection with machines.
"Real racist thought could only develop after Darwin and before modern genetics, when intervention in human DNA becomes possible. Racist thought is dead, just as I've said religion is dead intellectually. That doesn't stop remnants of it living on."
Daniel1 believes in the possibility of love, though feeling himself to be a "prehistoric monster with my romantic silliness, my attachments, my chains". For Houellebecq, "what excites me as a novelist is not my personal contradictions - I'm used to them - but the contradictions of other people. People are able to not believe in the possibility of love while being in love. Human beings are as contradictory as that."
Stephen King, introducing Lovecraft, writes that those who create their generation's fantastic literature "chart that generation's deepest fears".
Houellebecq's beliefs may, in a sense, be immaterial if his fiction captures the fears and contradictions of his age.
"It really gets on my nerves when publishers say they laughed a lot when they read my books," he says. "I want people to cry."
The Possibility of an Island is released next week by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/master-of-paradox/
2005/11/24/1132703317347.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
He graduated with a degree in agronomy in 1980 but had spells of unemployment and, after divorce from his first wife (he has one son), was treated for depression. He became a computer programmer at the French parliament in 1991, writing novels and poetry in his spare time. But he left after his second marriage, to Marie-Pierre Gauthier in 1998, and moved to Ireland.
The spark for Platform, which appears to present sex tourism as an ideal solution for rich, clapped-out westerners and locals with nothing to sell but their bodies, was a package tour to Thailand. "Day 1, Day 2 . . . Everything is so well foreseen," he says.
But in Platform, Islamic terrorists lay waste to a Thai resort. It was later seen as uncannily prescient of the Bali bombing of October 2002.
"It wasn't that difficult to predict," he says. "You just need to go to these places to see there's a problem developing", though he thinks everybody but Islamists "is profiting from it". He says the remarks for which he was tried were part of a dismissal of monotheistic religion. "I've too much contempt for religions to talk about them. It's a total waste of time."
He writes of Lovecraft's "obsessive racism", a charge some critics level at him, too. "I'm interested in subjects more important than race, not details of colour or skin," he says. "The biological fate of mankind, the struggle against ageing, the development of intelligence through interconnection with machines.
"Real racist thought could only develop after Darwin and before modern genetics, when intervention in human DNA becomes possible. Racist thought is dead, just as I've said religion is dead intellectually. That doesn't stop remnants of it living on."
Daniel1 believes in the possibility of love, though feeling himself to be a "prehistoric monster with my romantic silliness, my attachments, my chains". For Houellebecq, "what excites me as a novelist is not my personal contradictions - I'm used to them - but the contradictions of other people. People are able to not believe in the possibility of love while being in love. Human beings are as contradictory as that."
Stephen King, introducing Lovecraft, writes that those who create their generation's fantastic literature "chart that generation's deepest fears".
Houellebecq's beliefs may, in a sense, be immaterial if his fiction captures the fears and contradictions of his age.
"It really gets on my nerves when publishers say they laughed a lot when they read my books," he says. "I want people to cry."
The Possibility of an Island is released next week by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/master-of-paradox/
2005/11/24/1132703317347.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
posted by professor rat at 3:33 AM
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