“No subject is more touched on than love, in the human life stories as well as in the literary corpus they have left us; . . .no subject, either, is as discussed, as controversial, especially during the final period of human history, when the cyclothymic fluctuations concerning the belief in love became constant and dizzying. In conclusion, no subject seems to have preoccupied man as much; even money, even the satisfaction derived from combat and glory, loses by comparison, its dramatic power in human life stories. Love seems to have been, for humans of the final period, the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated. The life story of Daniel1, turbulent, painful, as often unreservedly sentimental as frankly cynical, and contradictory from all points of view, is in this regard characteristic.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (JUL 2, 2011)

It’s often said that a critic has no place christening contemporary works as literature; it’s for future generations to decide which books will live on and which will fall the way of obscurity. According to this line of thinking, 19th- century Russians were just as incapable of heralding their literary giants as the ancient Greeks were of immortalizing Homer or the Elizabethans, Shakespeare. But there’s something in this argument I’ve always found hard to believe: great literature lives on not because it’s incidentally suited to future tastes or historically informative; it lives on because it captures some of that elusive essence of what it is to be human, and while that universal quality all literature possesses is hard to pin down, to paraphrase Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it. Tolstoy’s contemporaries knew what they held in their hands with War and Peace just as I knew what I held in mine the first time I picked up a book by Jose Saramago. So let me be clear: Michel Houellebecq is such a writer and The Possibility of an Island is a book that will be read for generations to come.

The book, published in English in 2006, tells of a French comedian’s affairs of the heart. Far from politically correct, Daniel is a raunchy comedian, a social satirist, a “cutting observer of contemporary reality”, profiting from the absurdity of modern life with skits as controversially titled as Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine! and We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts!. Fame comes easily to Daniel, and with it follows money, so when Daniel falls in love with Isabelle, the beautiful editor of a pre-teen fashion magazine called Lolita, nothing stops them from retiring to a mansion on the Spanish Riviera.

But living together for the first time, Daniel discovers that while “[his]animal side, [his] limitless surrender to pleasure and ecstasy, was what [he] liked best in [himself]”, Isabelle, more coldly rational, dislikes sex, and because of this, they will never be true lovers. Moreover, as her body ages, she begins to despise it, letting herself go physically so that before long, they are no longer intimate, and as “the disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism”, they are condemned to an existence of “depthless irritation [that] fills the passing days.” Unable to bear her encroaching decrepitude, and correctly convinced that Daniel is no longer attracted to her, Isabelle leaves Spain for Biarritz, alone.

Isabelle isn’t the only one aging, and although he is rich, it’s getting increasingly difficult to attract the young women he desires– the young avoid anything that even hints at aging – until he meets Esther. Esther, a young, sexually adventurous actress makes Daniel’s life worth living again. However, she’s of a generation for whom love is passé and life is about pleasure-seeking and hooking up. While Daniel can’t live without his living-breathing fountain of youth, Esther does not love him, and soon, his pursuit of Esther devolves from warmly pathetic to mildly disturbing.

However, Daniel just wants true love and communion, and while his marriage to Isabelle was a meeting of the minds, it’s through his love for Esther, that “little animal, who was innocent, amoral, neither good nor evil, who was simply in search of her ration of excitement and pleasure”, that he realizes Esther’s generation is right, that “love had never been anything but a fiction invented by the weak to make the strong feel guilty, to introduce limits to their natural freedom and ferocity” and that he is nothing more than “a prehistoric monster with [his]romantic silliness, [his] attachments, [his] chains.”

The decline of Daniel’s sexual life begins just as he is introduced to the Church of Elohim, a cult that promises its members immortality through technology. Members submit their DNA for storage, hoping to be cloned as the technology becomes available in the future. When canny high-level members of the church turn the murder of their prophet into a publicity stunt – staging his resurrection in the form of the prophet’s living son – the church becomes increasingly popular. With the fall of Christianity and Islam in the West (Houellebecq eerily anticipates the Arab Spring), Elohimism, as a church “imposing no moral restraints, reducing human existence to the categories of interest and of pleasure …not [hesitating], for all that, to make its own the fundamental promise at the core of all monotheistic religions: victory over death” is perfectly positioned to become the religion of a post-religious world.

In fact, the novel is narrated by a succession of clones, each one appending the story of their life to the stories left by their predecessors. As the future Daniels meditate over their ancestor’s life, their existence – as bio-engineered neo-humans – reveals itself to be one of isolation in reinforced compounds in a post-apocalyptic world. While the neo-humans live a rational life, free of human desires, they, like humans, are “formatted by death” and shape their existence by the dictates of a prophet, the Supreme Sister, who prophesies the transcendence of the neo-human state and the arrival of the Future Ones. Neo-humans are exhorted to study and assimilate the longings of their human ancestor to further expand their consciousness and facilitate transcendence and the final evolution. However, at the end of their lives, rather than detached understanding, neo-humans often end up demonstrating human traits, creating art and verse, experiencing a shadowy longing , a desire for desire, prompting some to defect to join the human savages that scrounge around the barriers of the compounds.

After Daniel25’s cyber companion, Marie23, defects to seek out a human colony, Daniel25 is left wondering if perhaps there is more to life than this. Setting out from his compound with his dog, a clone of the original Daniel’s Fox, he opts to keep his dealing with the savages minimal. Although his nutritional needs are little more than mineral salts, sun and water, he travels far enough into the dried sea that he begins to feel physical discomfort akin to hunger and thirst. And as he watches Fox frolic in the woods, or the stars shine overhead, or waves lap against the beach, he understands “how the idea of the infinite had been able to germinate in the brain of these primates; the idea of an infinity that was accessible through slow transitions that had their origins in the finite; . . . and how the first theory of love had been able to form in the brain of Plato.” He also comes to realize that neo-humans, limited to the carbon-based existence of their human ancestors, will always be limited, unable to participate in the transcendence they’ve been working towards, however, doubly condemned, unable to experience the ecstasies or terrors of humans.

Houellebecq is a polarizing writer, and while I have no doubt that some readers will put this book down in (misguided) disgust, I’m equally sure others will finish it impressed by Houellebecq’s courageous intelligence. While most won’t agree with everything Houellebecq writes here, it’s hard not to admire his unflinching exploration of his theme –humans, like other animals, find true meaning in the unfettered satisfaction of bodily drives, especially the drive to reproduce. And if he’s to be believed and, for better or worse, we’re unable to escape our biology; perhaps our lofty myths of mated souls and true love have done human society more harm than good. Of course, I can’t really believe that; but I also can’t dismiss such an important book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; Trade edition (May 23, 2006)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia on Michel Houellebecq
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and another (short) Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Public Enemies

Bibliography (translated only):

• Whatever (1994; 1998 in US)
• The Elementary Particles (1998; 2000 in US)
• Platform (2001; 2002 in US)
• The Possibility of an Island (2005; 2006 in US)
• Map and Territory (2011; January 2012 in US)

With Bernard-Henri Levy:

• Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and The World (2008; January 2011 in US)

“We have, as they say, nothing in common – except for one essential trait: we are both rather contemptible individuals.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (JAN 11, 2011)

Originally published in 2008 in France, the newly released English translation of Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and The World doesn’t quite deliver the literary death match promised in the subtitle. That is, rather than a frenzied cockfight between two writers the French love to hate – the writers in question, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq are both controversial superstars in France –this collection of letters is something far better: a measured exchange between two thoughtful (and thought-provoking) writers on a wide range of philosophical issues. And while the letters lack the intimacy and the casual, almost incidental, handling of the abstract that often characterizes published correspondence–indeed, Lévy and Houellebecq aren’t friends; the correspondence was initiated with an eye to publication, a fact that mars the book with an off-putting self-consciousness – the exploration of topics as wide-ranging as the social and political obligations of the writer, the purpose and desirability of confessional literature, our all too human need to be liked, the perils of fame, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, divine breath and the life source, the void, the nothingness, render the book fascinating.

Of course, there will be those who pick this up for the notoriety of those involved.

Depending on who you ask, Michel Houellebecq is either a racist, misogynist, pornographer or a literary visionary who single-handedly revived the relevance of French literature. Despite their dark, nihilistic tone (Houellebecq has long waged war against depression), his novels are always bestsellers in France, and his controversial novel, The Elementary Particles, won the prestigious IMPAC/Dublin Literary Award in 2002. In 2010, he was awarded France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt— a honor many felt overdue – for his latest novel The Map and the Territory (scheduled to appear in English this September). In 2002, Houellebecq was quoted dismissing Islam as the stupidest of all religions and was promptly sued by a civil rights group for hate speech. A French court ruled that his statements were within his right to freedom of expression, but that didn’t stop many from denouncing him and his work as racist. And it isn’t just the media that’s attacked him: after depicting his mother, who abandoned him to the care of his grandparents, as a narcissistic hippie in The Elementary Particles, she came back with a memoir of her own, in which she calls her son a “dirty, little, bastard.”

For his part, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s notoriety comes from his immense wealth and overexposure. A rock-star philosopher (yes, there is such a thing in France) Lévy is so ubiquitous that the media refers to him simply as BHL. An Algerian-Jew, Lévy grew up in Neuilly-Sur-Seine, a privileged Paris suburb and attended the exclusive École Normale Supérieure. Criticized as much for his superficial thinking (he’s said not to have any original philosophical ideas) as his expensive suits and custom-made white shirts that he always wears open to expose his perpetually tanned chest, his libertine lifestyle provides much fodder for the tabloids. His most recent embarrassment involved the extensive citing of a Jean-Baptise Botul in his essay De la guerre en philosophie. As it turns out, Botul and his writings are a well-known philosophical spoof created by the French writer and philosopher, Frédéric Pagès.

With so much controversy surrounding these two, strangely enough, the most engrossing aspect of this book wasn’t the blows dealt to the French literary establishment. In fact, their claims to unfair persecution read as strident. Instead, I was moved by the importance of little moments, moments in which no one else would think to be vested with meaning, moments that reminded me just how unique and personal our own individual worlds are. For example, I wondered if Houellebecq’s father knew his son watched him so closely as he interacted with other fathers at the campsite (and concluded that he only entered into the society of those men grudgingly) or that his enigmatic assessment of two Resistance fighters killing a German officer in the metro as “not very interesting” would still puzzle his son decades later. And like them or hate them, these are two very powerful minds, minds at their best when discussing passions close to their heart: for Houllebecq, the primacy of poetry; for Lévy, the political obligations of writers, of citizens, to work towards a more just and equitable world. And at its best this exchange isn’t about the Michel Houellebecq or Bernard-Henri Lévy, the public personas. No, it’s about the intellectual passions of two men fortunate enough to have found, for six months at least, an equal partner in dialogue.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks (January 11, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Bernard-Henry Lévy  Wikipedia page on Michel Houellebecq
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq  Two writers who get along: Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes

Partial Bibliography:

Bernard-Henry Lévy (translated only)

• Adventures on the Freedom Road (1995)
• Sartre: The Philospher of the Twentieth Century (2003)
• Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (2003)
• War, Evil and End of History (2004)
• American Vertigo: Traveling in America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville (2006)
• Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (2008)

Michel Houellebecq (translated only)

• Whatever (1994; 1998 in US)
• The Elementary Particles (1998; 2000 in US)
• Platform (2001; 2002 in US)
• The Possibility of an Island (2005; 2006 in US)
• Map and Territory (2011; January 2012 in US)

Together:

• Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and The World (2008; January 2011 in US)