W
Whatever, by Michel Houellebecq – The first novel of Michel Houellebecq follows the Murakami Haruki vein of releasing a promising first novel about nothing that yet (still) hints at the promise to come, before launching a massive national bestseller. In Houellebecq’s case, Whatever (the original French title is Extension du domaine de la lutte, the literal English translation being “broadening the field of struggle”) is a very short novel of only 155 pages discussing the life of a certain drone bee in an IT company who is engaged in the training of his firm’s new software. Vaguely Kafka-esque in terms of its infrastructure, the story meanders around various corporate developments – he’s engaged in a new training programme at the Ministry of Agriculture of France, he ventures forth in this with a bizarre co-worker (the hideously ugly dandy wanna-be playboy virgin Raphael Tisserand) who’s inexplicably killed off, before ultimately going insane and drifting through life from institution to institution. Now sex-less, our narrator regularly becomes delusional, masturbates, and ultimately sets the structure to the more scientific (and more atomised) sequel, called Atomised.
While I am a habitual dog-eared of books, marking the various passages of interest in books I am too lazy to actually take notes about (in my defense, I mainly read books on galumphing buses and trains, where note-taking is near-impossible, even if I can get a seat), I had only done so twice in this book. Let’s see what I took note of:
I spotted a strange graffito in the Sèvres-Babylon Métro station: “God wanted there to be inequality, not injustice” the inscription said. I mused on who the person so well-informed about God’s designs might be.
She didn’t reply at first, thought for a few seconds then asked me:
“When did you last have sexual relations?”
“Just over two years ago”
“Ah!” she exclaimed, almost in triumph. “There you are then! Given that, how can you possibly feel good about life…?”
“Would you be willing to make love to me?”
She was flustered, I think she even blushed a bit. she was forty, thin and very much the worse for wear; but that morning she appeared really charming to me. I have a very tender memory of that moment. She was smiling, somewhat despite herself; I even thought she was going to say yes. But finally she collected herself:
“That’s not my role. As a psychologist my role is to equip you to undertake the process of seduction so that you might again have normal relations with young women.”
For the remaining sessions she had herself replaced by a male colleague.
How clever. How so very clever…