2023-06-14 05:29:49
With each scandal involving the writer Michel Houellebecq, one always wonders if it is arranged with the guy of the views. In a hundred-page confession soberly titled A few months in my lifewhich will appear at the end of June in Quebec, he rather maintains that he was the victim of a guy from the views, the Dutch director Stefan Ruitenbeek, in this strange affair of a porn film which made headlines everywhere when a trailer was released. broadcast on the web.
One of the darkest moments of his life, he says, but very much his fault, he admits, having stupidly signed a contract without reading the details (contract reproduced in full in the book).
But what did he do in this mess? And why make a book out of it? Above all, why is Houellebecq now accepting a media tour for this embarrassing little autobiographical book, when for years he has been refusing interviews for his novels?
The answer is in his relationship with the media, precisely. While he had given up the “reported remarks” of journalists for a long time, the leak of a few images from this film changed the situation. “Faced with an unforeseen catastrophe, I was going to have to resign myself to giving interviews. “Especially since his media situation in France, he believes, has” deteriorated “. “My enemies had become even more virulent, my friends had partly betrayed me, but above all, there was no longer any question of giving me the floor. The events concerning me might still be related when they were harmful to me; but my point of view no longer interested anyone. There, however, was not yet the strangest. The strangest thing was that my public presence had not been modified in any way. Almost everyone had tried to reassure me regarding this porn movie by telling me that one piece of information drove out the other, that it would be forgotten. Just regarding everyone was wrong: this porn movie would never be forgotten. Shame, to quote Kafka once more, was to survive me. »
The last thing I want to see is a porn movie starring Michel Houellebecq. But I read all his books, even this one which risks drawing even more attention to his sex tape.
He’s the French writer who makes me laugh the most, along with San Antonio. We tend to take him far too seriously, to see him almost as a prophet, while he looks more like a Gaston Lagaffe who stumbles in the postmodern rubble by stepping on each mine. I still can’t get over this morbid synchronicity of the release of Submission the same day of the attacks Charlie Hebdo.
Houellebecq is a perversion for the media. I feel compelled to write regarding him, because Everybody talks regarding it, but it never bores me. He’s not a cursed writer, he’s a literary Kardashian, who now seems to be hitting on us. revenge porn, responding with a book that will sell. He should have been seen on all the TV sets in France, in this characteristic presence of the character, shy, clumsy and very slow, which upsets the codes of television. And, as announced in this book, where he says that he is ready to make a media exception for euthanasia, “provided that the debate is moderated by David Pujadas”, he actually went to Pujadas to debate with Raphaël Enthoven on this subject that is close to his heart, an important theme of the novel Annihilate. It’s the writer’s most interesting engagement in recent years: he’s once morest it, for moving and articulate reasons.
This little book sometimes looks like a long Facebook status when someone caught up in a scandal tries to correct the situation by giving way too much detail. It’s not a scandal, it’s vaudeville. At the beginning, he quickly settles yet another inflammatory declaration on Islam, during a long interview with Michel Onfray which led to the publication of a special issue of Popular Front – resulting in a complaint from the Union of French Mosques. Houellebecq flatly apologizes to all those who might have been offended, even finds himself stupid and says he was wrong to amalgamate the problem of delinquency and Islam, to have mentioned the possibility of “Bataclan upside down” on the part of the “French of stock”. Rather, he believes a civil war in France is unlikely. But he settles his accounts more with Onfray, who curtly refused to withdraw the publication in question.
It’s the porn affair that interests him and he refuses to name the protagonists by their names, calling them instead the Cockroach (he’s the director), the Sow and the Turkey. Houellebecq says he never liked pornography, but he has a particular affection for amateur pornography, which is regarding love and giving, according to him. And to explain at length why it is difficult to film one’s antics oneself according to certain erotic positions, hence the interest of a director.
He said he honestly thought the footage would only end up on an Onlyfans site. It’s hard to believe, when you’re the most famous living French writer on the planet; you should think twice before speaking, just as much as being filmed naked. Difficult to have pity on Michel Houellebecq, all the same.
But this whole affair pisses him off.
It was excruciating to me to think that the only trace that would remain of my sex life, the liveliest part of my life, was mediocre coitus with an inert sow, filmed by a degenerate cockroach, the whole thing for sure. total ugliness. I deserved better than that; anyone deserves better than that.
Michel Houellebecq
All this enterprise, he fears, was only an “outgrowth of this immense movement towards asexuality, which characterized the beginning of the 21st century.e century, a tidal wave which was dragging modernity towards its ruin” – the writer was certainly not going to spare us the idea of decline.
Houellebecq recalls that he does not like feminists, which we already knew, but admits that for the first time in his life, he thinks he understands a little of what rape victims go through. At the same time, he has good words for his friend Gérard Depardieu, denounced for multiple sexual misconducts, while demolishing Picasso in passing, whom he calls an “ithyphallic cretin”.
A vaudeville, I tell you, but you can’t help reading it the way you watch a tank accident in slow motion. Houellebecq always manages to get people talking regarding him, and also affirms that the term “populist” is probably what describes him best, in which he is not wrong.
A few months in my life
flammarion
103 pages
In bookstores at the end of June
1686743471
#Michels #misfortunes #Press
