Houellebecq, Michel, Houellebecq, Michel

Michel Houellebecq’s writing is like a Sisyphean boulder careening down a slipper slope. His novels, which I first discovered some years back with The Elementary Particles, remind me that literature can be intelligent, absurd and sensual, a trinity of riotousness, smart-aleckness and philosophical chicanery. Houellebecq writes like a whirling Dervish on PCP, never once stopping to look backwards or over his shoulder, but with ferocity of language that is peerless, exhuming the absurdities of ontological nonsense from the graveyard of literature. No one since Beckett and Celine has written with such irreverent incaution, such passion for language and the glory of the incongruous. Read him and enrapt in the passion of what can be done with the novel when it is done right, (whirling and spinning, but always in control) if done at all.