In a text first published in 1991 and translated into English as “To Stay Alive”, Michel Houellebecq offered self-help advice to aspiring writers. Some of it was general: “Develop in yourself a profound resentment toward life… Ruin your life, but not by much… Be abject, and you will be true… When you provoke in others a mixture of horrified pity and contempt, you will know that you are on the right track.” Other tips were playbook-practical: “The mechanisms of the welfare state (unemployment payments, etc.) should be taken full advantage of… In a general way, you will be tossed back and forth between bitterness and anguish. In both cases, alcohol will help.”
When he wrote “To Stay Alive”, Houellebecq was still an obscure poet and civil servant, a few years away from his celebrity as Europe’s most controversial living novelist. But now Annihilation, his latest and longest novel, includes an acknowledgements page whose final words are, “By chance I have reached a positive conclusion: it’s time for me to stop.” If this really is la fin de Houellebecq, (he has since implied there may be more to come) he’s had a remarkably long run as object of cultural fascination. The epigraph to his 2010 novel, The Map and the Territory, in which the author included (and eviscerated) himself as a character, read: “The world is weary of me, and I am weary of it.” But that novel won its author the Prix Goncourt, making official Houellebecq’s acceptance by the French literary establishment. The world was not weary of him, and it was even less so five years later, with the publication of his novel of an Islamised France, Submission. I was living in Paris at the time and, published with dire serendipity on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the novel was everywhere.
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