Houellebecq

If you're just getting back into reading, Tao Lin is a better option.

I think he looked pretty cool when he was more well-groomed

Yeah he wasn't Chad Toundércoque but he looked sharp and intense

What are some works similar to Whatever that isnt by Houellebecq?
Read Praise by Andrew McGahan recently and it was in the same vein.

He's one of my favourites desu. Very easy to read, but a worthwhile addition to existentialist canon. He's deliberately very provocative, offensive and miserable, but I think he does this deliberately to characterise himself as the inevitable product of a sick society.

I thought Submission had some neat ideas but was underwhelming. Anything you recommend?

I found it good but also the least good of what I read. Platform and Atomised were my favourites.

Atomised was great.

I love his style but beware the allure of depression and fatalism, it's a comfortable place to sit with cowardice until Do you really deserve the things you want?

Whatever is actually his best work

Underrated

I liked platform

I liked Whatever ( or Extension of the domain of struggle as a better translation of the original title) really stuck with me expecially the theories on economical and sexual liberalism. He expands on the 80/20 modern sexual market rule quite well.

I actually don’t find his work depressing. If anything it makes me sort of giddy to finally read someone who writes about the world truthfully.

His new book on Lovecraft is difficult to acquire in Canada. Also, I've seen at least three different book covers on Google image search.

Could anyone shed some light on these things?

> ctrl+f
> Not a single mention of his poetry
> Not a single mention of La Possibilité d'une île

I thought you guys were supposed to know about this literature thing.

>His new book

Its not new at all, its several years old and is actually a late published essay he wrote as a young man

I've been tricked.

he’s brilliant and when he dies im gonna dance like a freak to Black Sabbath just for him

well I ain't no Houellebecq girl

1. Search "lovecraft against the world against life scribd" on google

2. See the scribd link

3. Press the small arrow next to the link and press Cached

4. Read the book for free.

Brava

I like to touch books.
A book that cannot be touched is like a woman that cannot be smelled.

-

i concur

why black sabbath? is he a big fan of them or something?

Google houellebecq dancing, it’s sublime

cant find it where is it?

Link. I might do it just for practice.

Also
>he can't read French
How the fuck did you make it through high school, my dude?

fuck off

youtube.com/watch?v=rlqG0-9SBPA

1. Google: Houellebecq non autorisé Enquête sur un phénomène Scribd

2. Press the small arrow beside the link and choose cached.

"Sure. It’s been hopeless for a long time, from the very beginning. You will never represent, Raphael, a young girl’s erotic dream. You have to resign yourself to the inevitable; such things are not for you. It’s already too late, in any case. The sexual failure you’ve known since your adolescence, Raphael, the frustration that has followed you since the age of thirteen, will leave their indelible mark. Even supposing that you might have women in the future - which in all frankness I doubt - this will not be enough; nothing will ever be enough. You will always be an orphan to those adolescent loves you never knew. In you the wound is already deep; it will get deeper and deeper. An atrocious, unremitting bitterness will end up gripping your heart. For you there will be neither redemption nor deliverance. That’s how it is."

^Read this excerpt on Veeky Forums, it almost made me cry and I've been too scared to read him ever since

That made my day, i love you user. have you seen the film? Been looking for a while and can't find it anywhere.

Whatever is filled with gut wrenching paragraphs. Here's another:

“The problem is, it's just not enough to live according to the rules. Sure, you manage to live according to the rules. Sometimes it's tight, extremely tight, but on the whole you manage it. Your tax papers are up to date. Your bills paid on time. You never go out without your identity card (and the special little wallet for your Visa!).
Yet you haven’t any friends.
The rules are complex, multiform. There’s the shopping that needs doing out of working hours, the automatic dispensers where money has to be got (and where you so often have to wait). Above all there are the different payments you must make to the organizations that run different aspects of your life. You can fall ill into the bargain, which involves costs, and more formalities.
Nevertheless, some free time remains. What’s to be done? How do you use your
time? In dedicating yourself to helping people? But basically other people don’t interest you. Listening to records? That used to be a solution, but as the years go by you have to say that music moves you less and less.
Taken in its widest sense, a spot of do-it-yourself can be a way out. But the fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering.
And yet you haven’t always wanted to die.
You have had a life. There have been moments when you were having a life. Of
course you don't remember too much about it; but there are photographs to prove it. This was probably happening round about the time of your adolescence, or just after. How great your appetite for life was, then! Existence seemed so rich in new possibilities. You might become a pop singer, go off to Venezuela.
More surprising still, you have had a childhood. Observe, now, a child of seven, playing with his little soldiers on the living room carpet. I want you to observe him closely. Since the divorce he no longer has a father. Only rarely does he see his mother, who occupies an important post in a cosmetics firm. And yet he plays with his little soldiers and the interest he takes in these representations of the world and of war seems very keen. He already lacks a bit of affection, that's for sure, but what an air he has of being interested in the world!
You too, you took an interest in the world. That was long ago. I want you to cast your mind back to then. The domain of the rules was no longer enough for you; you were unable to live any longer in the domain of the rules; so you had to enter into the domain of the struggle. I ask you to go back to that precise moment. It was long ago, no? Cast your mind back: the water was cold.”

what are his two must read novels?

>As before, the shrieking of the gatekeepers of probity on the issues of Third World prostitution and Islamophobia obscured completely the book's primary theme and its place in Houellebecq's developing universe: the redemptive power of love, and modern society's unrelenting desire to destroy it. Indeed, it is unfortunate that while Houellebecq has been called many things, a romantic is not one of them. For underneath the bile and porn that have made him famous, there is a childlike longing for, and a desperate belief in, love. We can only hope that once the controversies of the moment have faded away, it is for this strange and strangely moving paradox that Houellebecq will be remembered.

Benjamin Kerstein, 'The Western Abyss: Review of Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, p6; houellebecq.info/presse/223_azure.pdf

>I knew deep down that this young girl was a marvel; but it was no big deal, I'd done my masturbating. From the amorous point of view Véronique belonged, as we all do, to a sacrificed generation. She had certainly been capable of love; she wished to still be capable of it, I'll say that for her; but it was no longer possible. A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterises the modern era. Véronique had known too many discothèques, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomising the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so on leads, obviously, a slag's life; in ageing one becomes less seductive, and on that account bitter. One is jealous of the younger, and so one hates them. Condemned to remain unvowable, this hatred festers and becomes increasingly fervent; then it dies down and fades away, just as everything fades away. All that remains is resentment and disgust, sickness and the anticipation of death.

You can see Schopenhauer's influence on him especially in this quote.
He released a book this year called "In the Presence of Schopenhauer". Check it out if you can

Awesome.
Thanks for the heads up.

Not yet sadly

> And yet you haven’t always wanted to die.
> You have had a life. There have been moments when you were having a life. Of
> course you don't remember too much about it; but there are photographs to prove it. This was probably happening round about the time of your adolescence, or just after. How great your appetite for life was, then! Existence seemed so rich in new possibilities.
Fugg

user I implore you, please stop this.

I can't tell if there's some deep secret or if it's all just nu-male posturing. Clearly he encapsulates the feelings of sexual jealousy and resentment, but it's written from the jaded perspective of a too-oft rejected beta. Trying to decide whether to read him over Christmas break, or if I should just stick to poetry and the classics.

“I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.”

is he right?

That's pretty damn true...shit

>Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.

>He himself wanted nothing more than to love. He asked for nothing; nothing in particular, anyway. Life should be simple, Michel thought, something that could be lived as a collection of small, endlessly repeated rituals. Perhaps somewhat empty rituals, but they gave you something to believe in.

>The problem- and it was a new one for me-was my dick. It probably sounds strange now, but in the seventies nobody really cared how
big their dick was. When I was a teenager I had every conceivable hang-up about my body except that. I don't know who started it—queers, probably, though you find it a lot in American detective novels, but there's no mention of it in Sartre. Whatever, in the showers at the gym I realized I had a really small dick. I measured it when I got home—it was twelve centimeters, maybe thirteen or fourteen if you measured right to the base. I'd found something new to worry about, something I couldn't do anything about; it was a basic and permanent handicap. It was around then that I started hating blacks.

"Humor won't save you; it doesn't really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing. In the end there's just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end there's only death."

Yep, after Brexit there were seriously idiots saying that old people shouldn't get to vote because they'll be dead soon anyway.

That wasn't Hollaback's point.

The point was that the '68 generation (Europe's loathed BabyBoomer equivalent) started worshipping youth and hating the elderly along with tradition, so by the time the 90s rolled about, they were suddenly stupefied to find out that they themselves had grown old and ugly and ended up on the receiving end, desperately trying to be young again now that being old sucks.

>Sexual desire is preoccupied with youth, and the progressive influx of ever-younger girls onto the field of seduction was simply a return to the norm; a restoration of the true nature of desire, comparable to the return of stock prices to their true value after a run on the exchange. Nonetheless, women who turned twenty in the late sixties found themselves in a difficult position when they hit forty. Most of them were divorced and could no longer count on the conjugal bond— whether warm or abject—whose decline they had served to hasten. As members of a generation who —more than any before—had proclaimed the superiority of youth over age, they could hardly claim to be surprised when they, in turn, were despised by succeeding generations. As their flesh began to age, the cult of the body, which they had done so much to promote, simply filled them with an intensifying disgust for their own bodies-a disgust they could see mirrored in the gaze of others.

>Men who grow old alone have it easier than older women. They drink cheap booze and fall asleep, their breath stinks, then they wake up and start all over again; they tend to die young. Women take tranquilizers, go to yoga classes, see a shrink; they live a lot longer and suffer a lot more. They try to trade on their looks, even when they know their bodies are sad and ugly. They get hurt but they do it anyway, because they can't give up the need to be loved. That's one delusion they'll keep to the bitter end. Once she's past a certain age, a woman might get to rub up against some cocks, but she has no chance of being loved.

>I know what the veterans of '68 are like when they hit forty. I'm practically one myself. They have cobwebs in their cunts and they grow old alone. Talk to them for five minutes and you'll see they don't believe any of this bullshit about chakras and crystal healing and light vibrations. They force themselves to believe it, and sometimes they do for an hour or two. They feel the presence of the Angel or the flower blossoming within but then the workshop's over and they're still ugly, aging and alone. So they have crying fits—they do a lot of crying here, have you noticed?

Ironically the women that says so later drives her wheelchair down 5 stories

F-Fuck you user, why are you doing this to me

I agree, it's an amazing novel, often simple, beautiful, very funny; I guess its minor popularity comes from lack of Houellebecq's typical themes in it. On the other hand he got the G Prize mostly because of how he didn't offend anyone with this one, so...

Personally I hated Atomised because all of the characters were terrible, broken people, although that's his particular genius.

I read Submission and liked it very much, maybe principally because there was that small hint of "goodness" in the novel in the form of the dying light of the medieval church.

I almost cried reading that passage

just kidding I cried reading that passage

I found Submission cowardly

Based quotes poster

How so? Saying that the West is dead to the degree of Islam being an improvement is more beautifully contrarian than actually upholding liberal values in the face of it.

You sound like a woman on goodreads

>Between seven and twelve, a child is an astonishing being -- kind, rational and open, full of joy and convinced that the world is a logical place. He's full of love, and happy to accept what love we're prepared to give. After that it all goes wrong -- it all goes horribly wrong.

I would say the extreme cynicism (he would probably insist on its realism) of his books gives them a neutrality that countermands real bitterness, albeit some of Houllebecq’s characters are very bitter. Unlike in Roth, where impotence leads to crisis and invective, Houellebeq’s characters—e.g. Bruno and Michel in The Elementary Particles—either display a desperate fin-de-siecle decadence or pathological cynicism and removal from the world. This is not to say that Roth, by contrast, does express bitter sentiments, his attitude being at least ostensibly a kind of “Bellowvian” exuberance. Houllebecq’s models seem to be the French decadents, most saliently Huysmans. Also obviously, obvious because nearly every French novelist is, he’s indebted to Flaubert. Possibly he’s read Bernhard as well, and I’ve noticed some subtle affinities with Sebald. He vacillates between and occasionally manages to synthesize satire, the depraved aestheticism of Sade, Huysmans, and Bataille, and Flaubert’s two primary approaches (evinced in The Temptation of St. Anthony and Madame Bovary)

Whoever wrote that has his ages wrong.

Love this. I have always thought Houellebecq wrote about humans worndown and rung by modern Life who long for simple human connection and love. It is very apparent that his stories are about the absence of kindness and love, and he is a very sensitive writer and not repugnant.

Great read, but none of it in its original, authorial language.

This idea was precisely conceptualized by Clouscard.

I have been in despair after reading this, I thought all r9k incel theories had already blackpilled me to the utter extent, but this hit me hard.

...

Houellebecq writes in a humble ordinary language style so the prose is very easily translated. I wouldn't worry

I’m glad that I faked being a normie in my youth and got at least some good young pussy before retreating from the world, if only to be able to convince myself that my current disinterest is not some form of sour grapes.

This guy knows what’s up:

youtu.be/AloNERbBXcc

>This guy knows what’s up:
this is what Curb season 10 is going to be like, isn't it

One thing I find very bizarre about Houellebecq's works is the totally unfitting way the English translations are marketed. The covers make them look like airport novels, something your mum would read. And the titles! "Whatever" is an awful name for his first book. The main character isn't apathetic, quite the opposite: he ends up in a psychiatric hospital for caring too much. Whereas the original title (Extension de la domaine de la lutte) perfectly captures Houellebecq's theme: the [political] struggle of the '68 generation ("la lutte continue") catches up with them and extends to the rest of their lives. I get that it doesn't quite work in English, but "Whatever" turns the whole book on its head.

But okay, even if I assume that the English publisher didn't understand him and didn't really care, the fact remains that Houellebecq approved the titles of the English versions. I just don't get that.

Are there any Frenchfags ITT who can explain how he's marketed in France? I've tried asking French friends about him but since Submission he's just been That Racist Guy who says outrageous things on talk shows so everyone has an opinion on him without having read him. But are his books really portrayed as trashy cheap rubbish like they are in English?

Submission is quite good. Will definitely read more.

> Are there any Frenchfags ITT who can explain how he's marketed in France? I've tried asking French friends about him but since Submission he's just been That Racist Guy who says outrageous things on talk shows so everyone has an opinion on him without having read him.
They don’t deserve him

This picture makes me sad.

Should I give this to my mom?

>As a piece of writing, ''The Elementary Particles'' feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read.

nytimes.com/2000/11/10/books/books-of-the-times-unsparing-case-studies-of-humanity-s-vileness.html

What did they mean by this?

Is his poetry good then?
I'm thinking of getting this.

It includes:

Le Sens du combat
Les Particules élémentaires
Renaissance
Lanzarote
Extension du domaine de la lutte
Rester vivant
La Poursuite du bonheur
H.P. Lovecraft

A number of these are poem collections.

>Is his poetry good then?
you be the judge of that
youtube.com/watch?v=LLULVpcb5Mw

>Henri is one year old. He is lying on the floor. His diapers are dirty. He is bawling. His mother is walking back and forth, her heels clicking against the tiles of the floor, looking for her bra and her skirt. She is in a hurry to go to her evening rendezvous. This little thing covered with shit, moving around on the tiles, exasperates her. She begins to cry herself. Henri bawls all the more. Then she goes out. Henri has got off to a good start in his career as a poet.

>Marc is ten years old. His father is dying of cancer in the hospital. This pile of worn machinery, with tubes going down the throat, and intravenous drips: this is his father. Only his eyes are alive; they express suffering and fear. Marc suffers too. He too is afraid. He loves his father. And at the same time he is beginning to wish that his father would die, and to feel guilty about it. Marc has work to do. He should cultivate in himself this suffering, so particular and so fertile: this Most Holy Guilt.

>Michel is fifteen. He has never been kissed by a girl. He would like to dance with Sylvie, but Sylvie is dancing with Patrice, and she is manifestly enjoying it. He is frozen. The music penetrates to the deepest core of his being. It is a magnificent slow dance of surreal beauty. He never knew he could suffer so much. His childhood, up until now, had been happy. Michel will never forget the contrast between his heart, frozen with suffering, and the overwhelming beauty of the music. His sensibility is being formed.

L-LOL?

what is this from?

YAMERO

>Generally, the initial reaction of a thwarted animal is to try harder to attain its goal. A starving chicken (Gallus domesticus) prevented from reaching its food by a wire fence will make increasingly frantic efforts to get through it. Gradually, however, this behavior is replaced by another which has no obvious purpose. When unable to find food, for example, pigeons (Columba livia) will frequently peck the ground even if nothing there is edible. Not only will they peck indiscriminately, but they start to preen their feathers; such inappropriate behavior, frequently observed in situations of frustration or conflict, is known as displacement activity. Early in 1986, just after he turned thirty, Bruno began to write.

oh look it's Veeky Forums

Sounds like my 24/7 internal monologue desu

Frenchfag here.
Your friends are right. He has been branded as that racist, provocative guy since Atomized. But he's been playing with that image too. At the same time he's mostly considered as talented and his books are not portrayed as rubbish. The covers don't look trashy like their english counterparts either.
However Submission was considered more bothersome by the politically correct media. It was released the same week as the Charlie Hebdo killings, and sounded like a prophecy a bit too close to reality. Houellebecq also feared for his life in that context.

Elementary Particles and Submission

dang

i'm turning 30 soon

>nu-male posturing
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and say you're not a fucking idiot, in which case you should read Houellebecq because he's far far away from the category nu-male

white bois be scared
pol methodology exposed

>I realize I'm smoking more and more; I must be on at least four packs a day. Smoking cigarettes has become the only element of real freedom in my life. The only act to which I tenaciously cling with my whole being. My one ambition.

how tf do you even get to 4 packs a day? I've gone up to a pack and a half a day before and it isnt even pleasurable after a few hours

shit affects people differently