2 posts tagged “possibility”
Okay, so just finished the halfway point today of Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, in preparation for reviewing it for the website of my revamped arts center (re-opening this week!). And man, I'm telling you, as much as I've liked this book from almost the first page, it is unbelievably enough just getting better and better the farther I get into it. Take today's 50 pages, for example, in which Houellebecq gets on the subject of human happiness, and posits that most humans have the same three experiences when it comes to the topic...
1) The first time you experience true and profound happiness, which of course you never realize until you've lost it;
2) The second time you experience true and profound happiness, tinged now with the knowledge that you will one day lose this too;
and 3), the rest of your life, which is spent in such fear of losing future true happiness that most will never even allow such a thing back into their life in the first place. And this, he opines, is why most people's passionate phases are firmly in their youth, and why by middle age most people are instead simply treading water, with no bigger of a goal than for their spouse and children to not completely hate them. And this is also why we shouldn't care that much about the fate of the middle-aged and elderly, because the majority of them have given up on life and don't deserve to have their fates considered in the first place.
Brilliant, I tells ya! Of course, these are the same 50 pages where he off-handedly suggests that those who collect unemployment checks should be forced into prostitution for the elderly, in that they are literally stealing money from the elderly and should be forced to pay in one form or another. Oh, and that the only thing young women are truly useful for is their enthusiasm over kinky sex; but that most women outgrow their enthusiasm for kinky sex by their early twenties, so for God's sake you better fuck them before then if you want any use out of them at all. Yeah, not for the weak-hearted, Houellebecq, and certainly not for people who don't understand the dark but legitimate humor behind such outrageous statements, as well as the dark kernels of truth that inspire them. And now that I'm halfway through, it's especially easy to see why so many left-wing intellectuals are just so horribly, horribly offended by Houellebecq's work, because he reserves a special scorn in his writing just for them -- for their two-faced natures, for their inability to get certain jokes, for their tendency to take every single word out of a person's mouth as literal, for their unending natural ability to ignore anything in life that doesn't fit in with their idealized little liberal fantasies about how the world actually works.
Houellebecq is a difficult author, I'll grant you that, and if you're not offended horribly at least once while reading one of his novels, you're obviously not paying close enough attention. But man, I'm telling you, the guy can point out truths about society and humanity in a way I've never seen another author accomplish; scenes that just make you smack your forehead and yell, "Oh, duh! Yes! Of course! I get it now!" Of course, the truths Houellebecq are revealing are things that maybe a lot of people don't want to hear or think about, despite them being true, which is maybe why the academic community has had such a violent reaction to his work; for example, check out this hatchet job on Houellebecq penned by no less than John Updike, which of course ultimately makes Updike just look like the ineffectual doddering old man he actually is. I mean, seriously, does Updike have even a single fan on the planet who isn't a radical liberal with a Master's degree or higher? And usually some pussy with no sense of humor to boot? And who in most cases turns out to be a middle-aged professor fucking one of his 19-year-old students, proving Houellebecq's point better than Houellebecq himself ever could?
Okay, enough of this; gotta save some of it for the actual review, of course. End of line.
So, I'm reading Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island right now, one of the books I'm hoping to review as part of my art center's website finally re-opening next week. I'm about 50 pages into it now, and I've already come to realize two things...
1) The book is fucking mind-blowing; one of the most astute observations on the human condition I've read in years and years and years;
and 2) Michel Houellebecq hates humanity more than just about any person I've ever come across in my life. I mean seriously, he puts my own misanthropy to pathetic shame, and makes me look like Sandy fuckin' Duncan in comparison.
And I've been thinking a lot about this recently, about these two very different truths to come out of one person, and what exactly it means. Because the book is just so brilliant, I of course can't help but to sometimes fantasize about the idea of meeting and hanging out with him; of just how fascinating it would probably be, for example, to have one of those long French three-hour dinners with him, just to shoot the shit about the world and life and his opinions. But then another part of me just cringes at the very idea; because I know, I just know, if I ever were to meet Michel Houellebecq, he would take an instant and passionate dislike to me, and probably by the end of the night tear me a new asshole just for existing. And I just don't know how to feel about that, I really, really don't.
And then this morning, for the first time in my life, it occurred to me -- You know, this is probably how a lot of people feel about me as well. I mean, people have said as much to me before in the past, but I've never quite understood it; like this one reader from several years ago who I'll never forget, who at a certain point in our correspondence admitted that she was almost obsessed with the idea of meeting me, but will never voluntarily do so because she knew what a profound disappointment it would most likely be. And that's true; most readers who have met me have been disappointed by the experience, because ultimately I'm just some schmuck like anyone else, who likes to drink and talk about the weather and usually doesn't have much of interest to say in the course of a dinner party or the like.
I guess what I've never understood is how the dual emotions can exist in a person at the same time; how you can suspect that a person is a complete asshole, yet have this strong desire to meet them and hang out with them anyway. Before this week, whenever in life I've discovered that a person is an asshole, I simply don't want anything more to do with them; I stop reading their work, I stop talking with them, I stop thinking about them in any context again for the rest of my life. This week is the first time in my life that I've said to myself about a person, "I bet that guy would be a real dick if I ever met him -- and by 'dick,' I mean a dick to me -- yet for some reason I want to hang out with him anyway."
Like I said, I don't know where this comes from, and I don't know what to think of it. It's just...ugh, it's such a brilliant fucking novel! I'm sure that's what's fueling all this, that it is literally one of the best books I've read in the last ten years, and is just so unrelentingly grim and dour and bitter about the prospect of the human race surviving itself, yet is full of humor and tenderness and a sincere argument over why humanity is worth saving anyway.
So needless to say, I think I'm going to have a pretty good review on my hands when I finally finish the book; and now that I've gotten this sorta insight into myself as I probably look from the perspective of others, I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say about that in the future too. Oh, and another thing I've definitely learned so far, that I'm not nearly as misanthropic as I thought I was -- that I really do have a much larger love for humanity than real misanthropes do, and a much larger hope for the human race. That's a nice thing to discover, to tell you the truth, and gives me hope that I won't be as big an asshole as I currently am for the rest of my life. It goes without saying, I guess, that I recommend you reading this book!
