Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Strangely compulsive an experience it was to read so many Houllebecq novels one after another within a month. I hardly know what drew me along. His bracing pessimism perhaps. Or his fearlessness in saying what is often thought but seldom expressed. Or his surgical precision in dissecting our illusions. Or his frankness about male sexual desire. What is certain is that he is a moralist who confronts the amorality of our biological natures. As organic creatures, we are born, we die. All our grandest ideals, all our basest desires, take place between those two certainties. I read the novels in the order in which they were published. The Elementary Particles (or Atomised) tells the stories of two half-brothers, abandoned by their fathers and by their common mother who joined the 60s world of druggy free love. Bruno is a failed writer and a hedonist. Michel is an emotionally dead biologist immersed in his work. In other words, both find different ways of coping with their existential...

I vaguely heard of Michel Houellebecq before stumbling on his book of poems in the Labyrinth Bookshop. I did not know that he wrote poems, as well as novels. The Art of Struggle , translated by Delphine Grass and Timothy Mathews, is captivating from the first verse of the first poem: Dawn rises, grows, settles on the city We've come through the night and not been set free I hear the buses and the quiet hum Of social exchange. I'm overcome with presence. This is an aubade, but not an aubade that I've ever heard before. The lyrical second line is sandwiched by two plain-speaking lines. The faddish term "social exchange" shares the same line as the philosophical concept of "presence."How can one be overcome with "presence," usually considered a good thing, as opposed to "absence"? The speaker has been defeated even before the day begins. The poem beginning "What we need now is an attitude of non-resistance to the world...

A Position of Defeat Like lizards we bask in the light of phenomena, Waiting for night; But we will not fight, We must not fight, We stay for ever in a position of defeat.             Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Struggle , trans. by Delphine Grass and Timothy Matthews 1. the cancer sun of the computer screen bathes now the dying flower of my face the indices free-fall, in a coup de grace, or fly up, tempting the empyrean a meningitis strain is stalking me through chatrooms and darkrooms and sleep mode leers with the jewels of a horned toad files its reports to the drug company my teeth are rotting in their violent rant a patch of bone had to be grafted on to the jaw that’s not altogether gone to anchor the screw-up of the implant we must save up for a long rest of it yes, but save what? a bank of shiny shrugs i’ll go downtown to buy a big butt plug, ...