In twenty years, the author of The Map and the Territory (2010) and Submission (2010) has become a literary export product that captivates the planet. ” Michel Houellebecq is much more controversial in France than abroad, observes Antoine Jurga, a great expert in houellebecquism. His taste for provocation shocks the French public more than the foreign readership, which is interested above all in his work. In 2012, the academic and her colleague Sabine van Wesemael, from the University of Amsterdam, organized an international colloquium which later fed into an inspiring work on the star’s receptions and readings around the world.
He is portrayed as a Seneca, a Balzac, a great master of misanthropy. In the Netherlands, for example, “ he is considered to be an author who translates with great humor and intelligence the socio-cultural questions that haunt us: no accusations of racism, misogyny or hopeless nihilism in the Dutch press. On the contrary, we praise his insight, his humor, his visions on the spirit of the modern era and his purely literary qualities. »
Prophet
Germany, too, the plebiscite, praises its jokes and its great books on loneliness or fear, and the premium. Russian readers were among the first fans: in this Europe after the fall of the Wall, they saw him as a novelist critical of this voracious ultraliberalism to the depths of their souls, which they discovered. Norwegian academics, in 1997, organized a first major seminar titled with irony and fascination, ” Should we burn Michel Houellebecq? “, And the answer was:” Of course not ».
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In Spain, it is appreciated, but associated with ” phenomenon “Of the public figure,” counterexample of elegance and absolute master of editorial marketing “. It also affects Quebecers: “ The writer, from his first novel, systematized and represented sexual inequalities, which no one had done before him in literature. », Observes Montreal academic Hélène Dumas. She maintains a benchmark blog on “MH”, collecting enthusiastic reviews from readers in front of “ the crudeness of the words, the lucidity of the gaze and the emotion (suffering to live, need to be loved) that emerge from it ».
In the United States, we quibble it on the edge of the wokism plate, but we perceive it as a “ Prophet ” since Platform (2001) published at the time of the Word Trade Center attacks. Same sensitivity among the general Italian public, according to Professor Elisabetta Sibilio. Latin America, Mexico and Colombia in the lead, she devours him without restraint: ” Insensitive to the beauty of multiculturalism as to the promises of liberalism, his voice cares for others: the powerless, the frustrated, the losers, but also false winners. “Vibrates the semiologist Carlos Tello, professor at the University of Paris-7. Michel Houellebecq: a total star of globalization.
Cross-readings by Michel Houellebecq, Antoine Jurga and Sabine van Wesemael (dir.), Classiques Garnier, 300 p., € 39, 2017.
READ ALSO: We read the last Michel Houellebecq: “To annihilate”, a novel which sublimates the agony
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