Word: houellebecq
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Novelist Michel Houellebecq became one of France's best literary exports with his bad-boy attitude, and writing so raw and explicit that it could make even the saltiest readers blush. Now, to Houellebecq's presumed chagrin, the world is finding out where he got his in-your-face attitude: from his mother. In what has to be the consummate nightmare of any male with a fearless reputation, Houellebecq is getting a very public spanking from his own mother - and, man, is she one hacked-off lady. Even worse for the 50-year-old Houellebecq: she is showing the same...
...long cold war between mother and son suddenly turned white-hot in the run-up to the May 7 publication of The Innocent, an autobiographical book by Houellebecq's maman, Lucie Ceccaldi, 83. In it, Ceccaldi calls her boy a liar, impostor, and parasite "ready to do whatever it takes to attain fortune and fame." Excerpts and previews of the tell-all tome have generated major interest in France, as critics and readers alike gaze upon the spectacle of the nation's most famously jaded and cynical Bohemian being ridiculed in public by a mother who admits in disgust...
...call autofiction - thinly veiled memoirs that make no bones about being conceived in deep self-absorption. Christine Angot received the 2006 Prix de Flore for her latest work, Rendez-vous, an exhaustively introspective dissection of her love affairs. One of the few contemporary French writers widely published abroad, Michel Houellebecq, is known chiefly for misogyny, misanthropy and an obsession with sex. "In America, a writer wants to work hard and be successful," says François Busnel, editorial director of Lire, a popular magazine about books (only in France!). "French writers think they have to be intellectuals...
...reforms do not pass, the whole European project is at stake. This is about adaptation or extinction. In 1968, amidst the barricades that inspired Jean Paul Sartre, ideals rotted because of extremism and ideological stagnation. Beautiful dreams turned into anarchism, burning books, and Jacobin violence. Today, Michel Houellebecq, a prominent French writer, points out how even the utopian sexual revolution was perverted into a quasi-capitalist system of inescapable repression and perversion. So much for college dreams. According to another ’68 slogan, beneath the cobblestones, the beach lay. The beach is still there, waiting...
...Houellebecq has a gift for sleepy invective; he has contempt for both freedom and authority. But he's like a bad date--brimming with rank charm but few useful judgments. The great nihilist doesn't even know what a closet Victorian he is. Michel sentimentalizes commercial sex, imagining a Western encounter with the Third World that will be calculating and unglamorous but, all in all, gentle. You might say "gently empty." The empty part is a good bet. Somebody remind the author that the gentleness is not to be counted on. --By Richard Lacayo