Apparently a lot of people really don't like H because he kind of comes across as a misogynist and because of (at least) books like Soumission he is also called an Islamophobe. He's also kind of controversial because of his enfant terrible provocative persona which includes going to press conferences drunk and making passes at female reporters. And then there's the whole gratuitous use of weird sex scenes in basically all of his books. It seems that there are people who try to argue that it's super deep and has important connections to exploring societal decay. I personally would call it "provocation as a literary tool". Unfortunately it's a little overused and if that's really what he's going for he should probably use it a bit more sparingly because you kind of get desensitized to the whole thing.
Another common theme that one hears about H is that he is a modern prophet. La carte et le territoire is often claimed to have foretold the rise of digital art and that stupid NFT thing that thankfully died out a year or two ago. There's also the rise of celebrity culture but IMO this isn't so much prophesizing as just exaggerating what was already happening in 2010. Then there's Soumission which is one of his more famous novels and definitely brought up in the prophet theme. There it's about a Muslim political party coming to power in France and the country becoming "Islamic" (I guess?) very quickly and is partly an examination of the rise of political Islam in France. The thing here is that it came out literally the exact same day that the Charlie Hebdo office was attacked by Muslim Extremists in Paris and 12 people died including (I've heard) H's best friend or something like that. Finally (well not finally as in it's the only other example but finally as in it's the last one that I have the appetite to mention now) there's Sérotonine. This is an interesting book for several reasons and there are many arguably prophetic things about it but I think the most commonly raised is that in the book's climax the protagonist's (an agricultural scientist who has become sympathetic to the local farmers in Normandy because their traditional way of life is not just "threatened" but basically can no longer congruently exist in modern society) farmer friend leads an uprising with other farmers who feel they have nowhere to go and they try to stop the import of cheap foreign dairy. So the thing is that everyone in the media sees a direct link from this to the gilets jaunes protests that for a long while brought Paris to a stand-still in around 2018-2019. But if you read that book it had almost nothing to do with French agriculture or the fact that globalization is helping to destroy it. It was just an example he chose and the point was economic inequality, the decline of rural France in general, and (most importantly as it is a theme tying through all of H's books) the erosion of meaning in a secular society (which is really what Sérotonine is about).
Which finally brings us to H's most recent book, Anéantir (which is translated as Annihilation for some reason even though it should really be Annihilate but I digress). I just finally finished Anéantir and let me tell you it's a doozy. Now I'm no literature expert and when reading a book in French I really probably only understand 80% of the words if I'm lucky. But Anéantir is gold (despite one misstep which we will get to in due course). The novel has what seems at first glance to be the standard middle aged slightly depressed with of course strange sexual appetites (but nothing compared to most of H's protagonists) main character that we know and loathe from the books of H past. But Paul Raison is reasonable (lol!) and dare I say it, almost likeable? He is some kind of government employee who is the personal assistant to the successful finance minister Bruno Juge (who is very obviously based on the real finance minister Bruno Le Maire (lol!)). I can't go through everything in the book because SO MUCH HAPPENS (we also randomly read through at least a dozen of Paul Raison's dreams) but the important bit that ties a lot of it together is that there is some kind of secret group that none of the world's intelligence agencies have any clue about that is committing terrorist-like attacks that are quite baffling. It concerns our characters in multiple ways. The first "attack" is not an attack in the traditional sense because it's only some kind of hyper realistic video that is put online of Bruno being decapitated and it's spread all over the Internet. But then also Paul's dad, who has recently had a stroke and can no longer speak or move his body of his own volition, is a former French intelligence officer (since retired). The attacks become more brutal in that they eventually become actual attacks and people actually die. Another strange thing about this book in the context of the H literary universe is that despite all the sadness (Paul gets cancer and dies at the end of the book -- oops, spoiler alert -- and his brother commits suicide, and his father has a stroke that paralyzes him, and he mistakenly has a brief sexual encounter with his sister's daughter among other not-exactly-happy things) it's a pretty happy book in a lot of ways. Paul and his sensible, prudent estranged wife Prudence (lol!) live in the same house but haven't so much as touched each other in a decade and live in separate rooms and don't even really communicate. But his father's stroke seems to be the catalyst that starts bringing them together and over about 800 pages they slowly (and then very quickly) fall back in love and the last 100 pages of the book are basically in my opinion a sad+happy and beautiful philosophical "treatise" (I doubt that's the word) on a man coming to terms with his death.
But now the fatal flaw that almost ruined the book for me. So this is supposed to be serious literature. A lot of H's books (including this one!) are very funny sometimes and basically his entire oeuvre is satire. But the content and the topics and everything is kind of serious, even if the way it's portrayed is sometimes a little goofy. But plagiarism is too much! And from a 1990's video game!? Now, I'll accept that maybe -- just maybe -- it's a giant coincidence and that Michel Houellebecq didn't spend hours playing Police Quest III: The Kindred in the early 90's. But how else do you explain the following?
In Anéantir, as you'll recall, there are these attacks going on which had started before Paul's dad Édouard's stroke. At some point later on when Paul is at the family home going through documents for some reason (I can't remember why), he comes across some strange looking files that he somehow thinks are related to the attacks. They include Baphomet:
Unfortunately I just couldn't help myself from laughing at this part. Because this is THE EXACT PLOT AND WAY THAT YOU SOLVE THE MURDERS in Police Quest III: The Kindred (written by former police officer Jim Walls).
But besides that? Great novel, 10/10, would read again.
