Poems 1991–2013

Unreconciled

Selected poems from the critically acclaimed author of Atomised and Submission 
 
Dual-language edition

Houellebecq’s poetry opens a revealing window into a stubbornly consistent career. Readers who enjoy the dandyish despair of his fiction will not be shocked to find that, in poetry, Houellebecq channels masters such as Baudelaire – such a giant ghost here that he almost deserves a co-author’s credit – and Verlaine . . . But who knew that, in English, Houellebecq could sound so much like Philip Larkin – or even John Betjeman.'

All six of his [Houellebecq’s] novels, beginning with Whatever in 1994, now look like contemporary classics. What’s less well-known among his English-language readers is that he began his literary career as a poet … In his poetry Houellebecq presents the shocks and absurdities of modern life not casually but with beautiful formality, in alexandrines worthy of his beloved Lamartine, or quatrains as precise and irrefutably rhymed as those of A E Housman, charting what is not to be endured. His poetry is often not only absolutely direct emotionally – contrary to his reputation as a misogynistic cynic, deeply romantic even – but also remarkably funny, deploying, as Novak-Lechevalier observes, an art of montage, “the brutal juxtaposition of heterogeneities” … Michel Houellebecq is one of those writers who matters now, in his entirety, if any do.

When much modern poetry consists of trivial snapshots of daily life, it’s invigorating to come on a poet who speaks of first and last things, of love and its disappointments of cheated hopes, of the rare pleasure of moments of beauty.

Michel Houellebecq’s latest English language poetry collection, Unreconciled, evokes a strange nostalgia. While this relentlessly downbeat collection is entirely composed of poems from between 1991 and 2013, it feels far older than that … A must-read for the present day.

Houellebecq is perfectly suited to the age of Trump.

Houellebecq’s genius was to find out what his agony meant, to trace his personal fractures until they revealed the deepest traumas of a society and an age. No-one has been more interestingly unhappy than Houellebecq.

Selected poems from the critically acclaimed author of Atomised and Submission 
 
Dual-language edition 
 
This selection of poems chosen from four collections shines a fresh light on Michel Houellebecq and emphasises the radical singularity of his work. Drawing on similar themes as his novels, Unreconciled is a journey into the depths of individual experience and universal passions. 
 
Divided into five parts, Unreconciled forms a narrative of love, hopelessness, catastrophe and, ultimately, redemption. In a world of supermarkets and public transport, Houellebecq manages to find traces of divine grace even as he exposes our inexorable decline into chaos. 
 
Told through forms and rhythms that are both ancient and new, with language steeped in the everyday, Houellebecq’s vision of our era is one brimming with tensions that cannot – and will not – be reconciled.

Michel Houellebecq is a poet, essayist and novelist. He is the author of several novels including The Map and the Territory (winner of the Prix Goncourt), Atomised, Platform, Whatever and Submission. He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 2019.

Selected poems from the critically acclaimed author of Atomised and Submission 
 
Dual-language edition 
 
This selection of poems chosen from four collections shines a fresh light on Michel Houellebecq and emphasises the radical singularity of his work. Drawing on similar themes as his novels, Unreconciled is a journey into the depths of individual experience and universal passions. 
 
Divided into five parts, Unreconciled forms a narrative of love, hopelessness, catastrophe and, ultimately, redemption. In a world of supermarkets and public transport, Houellebecq manages to find traces of divine grace even as he exposes our inexorable decline into chaos. 
 
Told through forms and rhythms that are both ancient and new, with language steeped in the everyday, Houellebecq’s vision of our era is one brimming with tensions that cannot – and will not – be reconciled.

Submission

Submission is the highly-anticipated new novel from the internationally bestselling French writer Michel Houellebecq

A work of real literary distinction…[Houellebecq] has been the novelist who has most fearlessly and presciently tackled the rise of Islamic extremism in recent years…He is a writer with a gift for telling the truth, unlike any other in our time – I’ve been consistently saying he is the writer who matters most to me for many years now. I’ve read Submission twice in the last week with ever growing admiration and enjoyment. There’s been no English-language novel this good lately. With Submission Houellebecq has inserted himself right into the centre of the intellectual debate that was already raging in France about Islam and identity politics…There is nobody else writing now more worth reading.

One cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature without reading his work.

The narration is enjoyably sardonic, a pungent mixture of deadpan jokes about sexual politics and close reading…Darkly clever and funny.

A fine, deeply literary work…It is genuinely more admiring than critical of Islam…It’s electrifying; no recent English-language novel compares.

Houellebecq’s placid dystopias have been among the only contemporary novels worth dropping things for – and this is arguably the best of the lot…a bleakly funny satire on submission and salvation…I can’t think of another contemporary writer who bares their soul so fearlessly – or with such rewards.

Witty and deft…The polemical power of his imagination…approaches that of two 20th-century masterpieces, Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World…This is an important novel…It’s worth remembering that Houellebecq has form in demonstrating that life sometimes imitates art.

Houellebecq’s latest, Submission, brings his project to its most accessible realization yet. What’s the project? Jerking your chain at the highest possible level, which a lot of people can sense from the vibe around Houellebecq, and therefore pre-emptively avoid. You shouldn’t. The free and wild play of his hatred for modernity and its usual self-flattering reassurances is a tonic to be relished. Houellebecq’s respect for his avowed models – Lovecraft, and here, Huysmans, reveals a sturdy commitment to older narrative forms, even genres – he’s a horror writer, here updating the ‘Deal-with-the-devil’ tale. Lorin Stein’s relaxed translation catches how Houellebecq’s insouciant revulsion for propriety, and his congenital self-loathing, trickles down into a vernacular full of tiny slippages in and out of bourgeois formality, somewhat akin to Inspector Clouseau trying to recapture his authoritativeness after a pratfall. In the past these have read as errors of tone, but in Submission, they’re as funny as I think Houellebecq intends.

No question about the book of the year: it’s Michel Houellebecq’s Submission in Lorin Stein’s fluent translation…Following its publication, the Guardian asked brightly: ‘Does Houellebecq really hate women and Muslims, or is he just a twisted provocateur?’ But the book is more nuanced and more troubling than that. The narrator doesn’t register women who aren’t young and shaggable – tell me that’s not how men see women – and in this story, it’s libidinous intellectuals who succumb to the new order because it suits them. Plausible? Sort of. Worrying? Yep. Important? Very.

Submission is both a more subtle and less immediately scandalous satire than the brouhaha surrounding it might suggest…All described with lashings of Houellebecq’s characteristically phosphorescent bile…That we feel Houellebecq’s satire (like all the best from Swift to Céline to Waugh) is only half in jest makes reading Submission a shifty, discomfiting affair: we’re never sure quite how many steps ahead of us the author is; how much of the nastiness is meant and how much mere drôlerie; how many levels lie beneath, just waiting to suck us down from our moral high ground.

It is a fascinating and disturbing vision of a society which becomes an accidental theocracy... A rather brilliant conceit, worthy of George Orwell…Submission is a fascinating and original dystopia – challenging and ambiguous. It is a vision of what could happen if the West finally abandoned liberal enlightenment values and fell into the arms of religion.

Houellebecq has an unerring, Balzacian flair for detail, and his novels provide an acute, disenchanted anatomy of French middle-class life … Houellebecq writes about Islam with curiosity, fascination, even a hint of envy.

There are echoes of Albert Camus’s outsider, Meursault, in François’ lack of emotion and relentless cynicism…Submission, expertly translated by Lorin Stein, can be read on a number of levels. As much as it is about Islamic and political tensions in France, Houellebecq also explores the inner world of his chauvinistic antihero who struggles to find meaning in his life and seeks solace in sex.

Michel Houllebecq's Submission is many things: comic, profound, and at times unexpectedly moving. It is much more about human nature than Islam, and to think otherwise is to misunderstand it. Of the several suicide notes for the west Houellebecq has written, this is his best.

Extraordinary… if there is anyone in literature today, not just in French but worldwide, who is thinking about the sort of enormous shifts we all feel are happening, it’s him.

Submission is polemical and comic by turns.

A diligent, even-tempered novel of ideas.

A brilliant translation by Lorin Stein…It is a captivating read (perhaps thanks to the translator, who is plainly equally at home in English and French, and who is so good that you hardly ever remember that you are reading something originally written in a language utterly different from English)…A highly plausible political thriller.

Submission is an intelligent, misanthropic satire that addresses questions crucial to multicultural societies.

The publication of Houellebecq's controversial novel...was a political event in itself. The book is brilliant, funny and deliberately offensive...and offers a sharp insight into the troubles of modern France

The year’s most prophetic and provocative novel.

The most talked about, and most topical, novel.

If you only read one book this summer, read this one … Please read this book. It says more about where we stand and what might happen than anything else I have read in the past few years.

A fascinating book, and, as always with Houellebecq, horribly readable.

Uncomfortable and satirical – it shows one of France’s great controversialists at his best.

A timely, caustic, often funny novel… It has the cleverest, most satisfying ending I’ve read all year.

Submission is the latest Houellebecq novel and perhaps his most bitingly funny in parts, but it’s also a reminder of how European nations may succumb to foreign domination and “submit”.

What a visionary!... You must read it this summer, you’ll love it. It’s so incredible they published that a year before everything happened… He has a vision and it’s incredible… Incredible!

The literary chronicler of Western decadence

As the 2022 French Presidential election looms, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and the charismatic Muhammed Ben Abbes of the growing Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the political left to block the Front National’s alarming ascendency, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. This proves to be the death knell of French secularism, as Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for our narrator François – misanthropic, middle-aged and alienated – life is set on a new course. 
 
 Submission is a devastating satire, comic and melancholy by turns, and a profound meditation on faith and meaning in Western society.

The Map and the Territory

Part thriller, part satire, the critically acclaimed latest novel by the winner of the Prix Goncourt is quintessential Houellebecq and perhaps his best yet.

A delicious exercise in satire and self-parody... His best ever

The outlaw of French letters returns with an acerbic riff on art and celebrity... witty, wildly erudite

A dark master of invention... From the very first paragraph of this brilliant novel, the reader can be in no doubt that they're in the blisteringly bleak, darkly inventive grand massif that is Houellebeqc land

This book, so beautifully written, so inspiriting for all its pessimism, is the new novel I have loved best this year. We have not his equal

Impressive... Beguiling... He is a true original

Elegiac... Compelling... A pleasure to read

Have Michel Houellebecq and Martin Amis ever met? Despite a stylistic gulf…they might be spiritual cousins… In this Goncourt-winning novel, as amiably mischievous as the enfant terrible ever gets, his satirical burlesques of the Parisian art world and of tourist kitsch in La France Profonde comes closer to his cross-Channel twin than ever

A wry, clever, ruthlessly self-lacerating novel

Artist Jed Martin emerges from a ten-year hiatus with good news. It has nothing to do with his broken boiler, the approach of another lamentably awkward Christmas dinner with his father or the memory of his doomed love affair with the beautiful Olga. It is that, for his new exhibition, he has secured the involvement of none other than celebrated novelist Michel Houellebecq. 
 
The exhibition brings Jed new levels of global fame. But, his boiler is still broken, his ailing father flirts with oblivion and, worst of all, he is contacted by an inspector requiring his help in solving an unspeakable, atrocious and gruesome crime, involving none other than celebrated novelist Michel Houellebecq... 
 
Shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2013.

Lanzarote

Hedonism, extra-terrestrials and an exiled police inspector collide in this novel from the internationally bestselling author of Atomised and Submission

Houellebecq captures the spirit of the age better than any other novelist, or any social historian, writing today

There is no other writer like him, at the moment, for wit, acuity or the transparent beauty of his prose. His themes are always big and bravely expounded

What Houellebecq has in abundance is an ability to turn commonplace events into high comedy-I enjoyed [Lanzarote] enormously

Reading Houellebecq is like being caught up in a tropical storm: you are blown away by the ferocity of his imagination

A poet, essayist and novelist, Michel Houellebecq is the author of several novels including The Map and the Territory, Atomised, Platform and Whatever.

Realising that his New Year is probably going to be a disaster, as usual, our narrator, on impulse, walks into a travel agency to book a week in the sun. Sensitive to his limited means and dislike of Muslim countries, the travel agent suggests an island full of 21st century hedonism, set in a bizarre lunar landscape - Lanzarote. 
 
On Lanzarote, one can meet some fascinating human specimens, notably Pam and Barbara - 'non-exclusive' German lesbians - who can give rise to some interesting combinations. Will they succeed in seducing Rudi, the police inspector from Luxembourg, currently living in exile in Brussels? Or will he join the 'Azraelian' sect, as they prepare for humanity to be regenerated by extra-terrestrials? As for our narrator, will he consider his week's holiday on the island a success?

Platform

'Reading Houellebecq is like being caught up in a tropical storm: you are blown away by the ferocity of his imagination' Observer

With Atomised, you could see that Houellebecq was headed for greatness. With Platform he has attained it. The book is a stunning achievement

Reading Houellebecq is never deflating; it is, rather, a source of constant inspiration and delight. Would that we could produce his like in England

Michel Houellebecq has put contemporary French literature back on the map in a way not seen since Camus

There is something new and rare here, a genuinely unsettling wit with a terrible tang of truth

From the author of cult favourite Atomised 
 
'Reading Houellebecq is like being caught up in a tropical storm: you are blown away by the ferocity of his imagination' Observer 
 
Michel is a civil-servant at the Ministry of Culture. When his father is murdered, Michel takes a leave of absence to go on a package tour to Thailand. Infuriated by the shallow hypocrisy and mediocrity of his fellow travellers, only the awkward Valerie attracts his attention. Too bashful to pursue her, Michel prefers the uncomplicated pleasures of Thai massage parlours and sex with local women. 
 
 Back in Paris, he calls Valerie and they plunge into a passionate affair, which strays into S&amp;M, partner-swapping and sex in public. Michel quits his job, and tries to help Valerie and her boss, Jean-Yves, in their ailing travel business, by offering travel packages based on sex tourism in the third world. When their project comes to fruition and the three return to Thailand, Michel discovers that sex is neither the most consuming nor the most dangerous of human passions... 
 
'With Atomised, you could see that Houellebecq was headed for greatness. With Platform he has attained it. The book is a stunning achievement.' Evening Standard

Atomised

The gloriously moving and extravagantly filthy cult classic from the internationally bestselling author of Submission

Very moving, gloriously, extravagantly filthy and very funny

Compelling...wrenchingly terrible... Unhealthy and haunting, rich and provocative, Atomised astonishes both as a novel of ideas and as a portrait of a society

Sheer brilliance...totally mesmerising, energising, infuriating and moving... Compulsory reading

A novel which hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits

Destined to become a cult book...a genuine page-turner

Bullying and brilliant... Atomised is nothing less than a road-rage map of our times

Makes you re-examine your beliefs... This is a brave and rather magnificent book

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. 
 
Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. 
 
Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. 
 
Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections. 
 
Atomised tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is the dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls' magazines. A dissection of modern lives and loves. By turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.

Michel Houellebecq

Shaun Whiteside

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2020 
 
A powerful criticism of modern life by one of the most provocative and prophetic writers of our age 
 
Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain's release of serotonin. 
 
When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return towhat they remember as a golden age. 
 
'Despite its provocations, this is a novel of romantic and sorrowful ideas: Houellebecq as troubadour, singing lost loves' Rachel Kushner 
 
Michel Houellebecq has good claim to be the most interesting novelist of our times. . . Exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable' Evening Standard

Michel Houellebecq

Serotonin

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