Word: houellebecq
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...didn't end there. After his final heated dispute with Ceccaldi in 1991, Houellebecq wrote "I knew I would never see my mother again, and I thrilled with joy." Houellebecq later gave an interview in which he described his mother as factually, literally, irrevocably "dead." Now Ceccaldi is back to prove that the filial report of her death was not only exaggerated, but also a really big mistake...
...clearly wanted to write about him. Ceccaldi's book does not focus exclusively on Houellebecq, but her assessment of his personal and artistic flaws are the meat of a work apparently conceived and executed as an act of revenge. In one section, for example, Ceccaldi caps off a point by urging her son to go have something extremely intimate done to himself that no mother should ever order her child...
...Ceccaldi get sufficiently cheesed off to launch her assault on Houellebecq's contemptuous and impudently unflappable mystique? In large part because Houellebecq's books generally cast mother figures as dysfunctional, negligent, or psychologically twisted, and he has described his own in just such terms. In his 1998 success The Elementary Particles (published under the title of Atomized in the U.K.), for example, Houellebecq portrays his mother as so self-centered and infatuated with her own rootless, irresponsible hippie credo that she abandoned him in order to be able to travel and explore new experiences at will. Similarly...
...Despite the many verbal blows Ceccaldi lands in the book - some below the belt, many studded with expletives - it's probably unwise to expect Houellebecq to accept her terms to a truce. Her account of her earlier life as a wandering, post-war version of a New Age-ist doesn't really differ from Houellebecq's variant of how and why Ceccaldi left him with his grandmother. Where they differ most is in analyzing the consequences of her decision...
...Ceccaldi contends that her son subjected her to such harsh literary treatment because such abuse is "a good money earner" in a world that flocks to Houellebecq's writing "because the spirit of the day is such garbage that he is in step with the time." For now, Houellebecq is not commenting on his mother's book. Here, apparently, is a rare controversy he seems content to sidestep...