Word: michele
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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...
...very explicit coupling, nothing in Platform is written with a smirk. Michel believes that only the body is to be trusted, its pleasures the only reliable refuge. Capitalism he's resigned to. Religion he thinks of as a fool's game that leads to murderous fundamentalisms. The book ends with a terrorist attack at a Thai resort and some especially nasty passages about Muslims--the grieving Michel describes his pleasure at any news of pregnant Palestinian women being killed...
...summer of sex scandals in the heart of Europe - but be careful which heavy-breathing headlines you believe. German papers are full of allegations that Michel Friedman, a prominent Jewish leader, was one of 100 well-known men found to be frequenting Berlin prostitutes. (He has made no comment.) And the French are bewildered by events in Toulouse, where underworld figures have accused several local leaders of taking part in sadomasochistic orgies - and then ordering the execution of at least one witness who was preparing to expose them. In May, convicted serial killer Patrice Alègre confessed...