Word: houellebecq
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Nobody does abjection like Michel Houellebecq. He's French, after all, so he has the exemplary squalor of Sartre, Celine and Genet to live up to. It was the state-of-the-art estrangement, plus the sex, that made his second novel, The Elementary Particles, a huge best seller in Europe and made Houellebecq (pronounced Well-beck) a heavily contested literary star. Last year he was acquitted by a French court of inciting racial hatred after he called Islam "the most stupid religion." (Does it help to know that his mother left him in childhood for an Arab and converted...
...Houellebecq is that eminent specimen of literary animal, the deadpan desperado. (Think William Burroughs, but more readable.) The narrator of Platform, also named Michel, works for the French Ministry of Culture. A nobody-in-particular who has made his peace with that, Michel has a gift for loathing so nasty-funny he could be British and a faith in the groin as the fountain of all contentments. Even masturbation he surrounds with a beatific glow. "I gently emptied my testicles...
After his father is murdered, Michel takes a tour-group vacation to Thailand. The dreadful fellow travelers, the machine-tooled John Grisham novel on the predictable beach--Houellebecq expertly takes the measure of modern enjoyments. But Michel also meets Valerie, then moves in with her in Paris. When she accepts an executive job with a hotel chain, he persuades her to convert some of its Third World hotels to sex resorts...
...ACQUITTED. MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, 45, provocative French writer; of charges of inciting racial and religious hatred during an interview in which he labeled Islam as "the stupidest religion"; in Paris. Ruling against the Muslim groups that filed the complaint, the court said that Houellebecq's comments "were not intended to in-sult the followers of the religion in question...
...Michel Houellebecq...