MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, FOUNDER OF NEOREACTION

Michel Houellebecq: a boon to spellcheckers the world over.

by Brett Stevens

With Michel Houellebecq in the news for his novel, Submission, it makes sense to remember his roots. He has made his name writing about the tedium of modern life and fleeting glimpses of beauty, truth, and purity that tempt people from it. His usually tragic characters cannot realize that beauty because of their broken psychologies and neuroses.

Houellebecq burst onto the scene in 1997 with Whatever, a cynically humorous book — think Louis-Ferdinand Celine or William Burroughs — about the failure of modern life. The characters struggle through pointless and boring jobs, alienating sexual relationships and dysfunctional families, all while wandering through a 21st-century dystopian wasteland that is both beautiful in its ruin and crassly plastic in the assumptions through which most people survive.

THE PURGE AND THE POETS

From left to right: PA Cousteau, Claude Jeantet (standing) and Lucien Rebatet.

by Rémi Tremblay

When one thinks of the French language, it is impossible not to think of the richness of its literature. Known for its theater and poetry, its classicism and romanticism, French has produced some of the world’s best authors. But like many things in France, its culture is declining. Where did this decline start? Did it start with the Cultural Marxist revolution of the 60’s? French author Léon Arnoux who recently published L’épuration et les Poètes (The Purge and the Poets) claims the origins of the decline coincide with the purges at the end of the Second World War.