Word: michels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...middle-aged, balding and his angst is monumental. But novelist Michel Houellebecq just might become your newest hero. Although Americans are just beginning the struggle to pronounce his phonetics-defying name ("Wellbeck"), the French have been engaged for the last two years in an intense debate over the significance of his scandalously right-wing and pornographic weltenshaung. But if you haven't heard of Houellebecq, never fear; in the course of the next year, you will probably be unable to avoid him. To many French, he has already been christened the new Camus, a potential leading figure for a whole...
...Houellebecq's credit, his artistic failures are not due to a lack of effort. In fact, to a large extent they can be attributed to an excess of ambition, to a preoccupation with analyzing "the big picture." Ostensibly, The Elementary Particles tells the story of half-brothers Bruno and Michel as they struggle to cope with a world torn apart and debased by the sexual revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, from the historical tone of the prologue to the modest conclusion of the novel ("This book is dedicated to humanity"), Houellebecq constantly reminds his reader that...
Bruno and Michel are members of that awkward generation too young to be considered baby-boomers and too old to fit in with the Generation-Xers. They are, rather, the product of the hippie free love that was just beginning to flourish on both sides of Atlantic forty-odd years ago. Born to a loveless woman who leaves both sons with their respective grandparents in order to join a commune in California, Bruno and Michel become, essentially, the direct descendants of their age. Both dracins endure lonely and occasionally brutal childhoods that leave them unlovable and incapable of loving...
...Colombia to $1,000. Haiti, of course, has no money-laundering laws. The money is fueling a grossly incongruous boom in luxury-home construction in Port-au-Prince and, say locals, paying for a glitzy new shopping center in more impoverished Port-de-Paix. The mall was built by Michel Oreste, 70, whom Haitian officials describe as a modern-day successor to the buccaneers who once controlled the northern coast. Oreste denies involvement in drugs, and while Haitian police say they fear that drug money is filtering into his businesses, he is not suspected of drug trafficking. "But I have...
...mention this history in order to introduce my real subject - the infinitely civilized, decent, and human Michel de Montaigne, sometime mayor of Bordeaux and inventor of the modern essay. Montaigne, a Catholic whose mother was a Jew, lived squarely in the middle of the religious wars, yet managed to survive them handsomely and even to be a friend to Henri of Navarre and Henri of Guise, not out of duplicity but out of sheer decency...