Houellebecq shows his soft side

One thing is certain. In Destroy, the novel by Michel Houellebecq with an awkward title, the writer shows his softest sides. Empathy, affection, lustful love, they appear in a novel in which lives are turned upside down and the world is not left behind.

You almost expect that in a new novel Michel Houellebecq will once more imagine a world that the dogs don’t like to eat. In part this is true, since for some time now things have taken a “general turn” for the main character Paul Raison, which had created a “pseudo-ludic, but in reality almost fascist normative atmosphere that gradually affected everyday life down to the smallest detail.” had contaminated corners’. Such exasperated belches on the level of the downfall of civilization do not set the mood of the novel. They are imperceptibly pushed aside by the attention-demanding family life that Paul Raison has to deal with: his father suffers a cerebral infarction at the beginning of the novel.

There’s in Destroy not one thematic core from which to see everything in these nearly six hundred pages. So also not what the title suggests: that it will be regarding ‘destruction’. If there’s one thing that predominates, it’s the…