/lit/ - Literature

What's your initial emotional reaction to the fact that every single great author published their first book by the age of 30?

What will you do if you don't meet the deadline for genius?

What's his problem?

did he predict the incel epidemic?

>"What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean-Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq’s novels, as pointless and pathetic. (‘Her ugly little face is glum, she regularly wipes her glasses. I even wonder if she hasn’t been crying; I can just picture her breaking into sobs in the morning as she gets dressed, all alone.’) Demonpion records the grievances of Schnäbele (in the novel, a self-aggrandising IT manager known as ‘the Serpent’), who has no memory of meeting Houellebecq: ‘I recognise myself in his descriptions. He describes my office, mentioning the posters that I had up at that time, which proves that he was physically there – but from a very biased point of view. That said, an author has every right to his freedom of expression. I just wish he’d changed my name.’"

Why would he do this?

I still can't understand, on an ethical level, why Houellebecq would include the real names of real people in his novel and attack them so viciously.

>>11407539
Sheer poetry

I don't think he would be surprised, Houellebecq wrote about incels wanting to stab coalburners to death back then and that was before the internet age.

>“It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Whatever

Eleven years later:

>“The summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. I hesitate to discuss the idea with my fellow Muslims, who might consider it sacrilegious, but for me there’s a connection between woman’s submission to man, as it’s described in Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man’s submission to God. You see,” he went on, “Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such, Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha—unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn’t Satan called ‘the prince of the world’? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it’s an absolute masterpiece.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

Hmm..