Oskar Oprey at Artforum:
I THINK I’M GOING TO LEARN FRENCH, if only to keep up with Michel Houellebecq. The aging bad boy of letters has been embroiled in a fresh crop of scandals these past few years, the plotlines worthy of an X-rated soap opera on Canal+. First there’s his legal battle with Dutch art collective KIRAC—they collaborated on a pornographic film project together, in which audiences would have seen Houellebecq having sex with women other than his wife. He seems to have gotten cold feet after the trailer was teased, even though he’d already signed a release form. Then there are the accusations of plagiarism surrounding his 2015 novel Submission, which imagined France embracing Sharia law. Speaking of which, Houellebecq has also apologized for offensive comments he made in an interview published in Front Populaire. Meanwhile, Meta’s AI tool has refused point-blank to write in his style. A short memoir titled A Few Months of My Life (Quelques mois dans ma vie: Octobre 2022–Mars 2023) was published last year, in which Houellebecq gave his account regarding some of these stories. Sadly, this has yet to be translated into English. Which brings me to my main reason for taking French lessons: I want to read his damn books as soon as they hit the shelves! His latest novel, Annihilation, was originally released in France in January 2022; the English translation was subsequently mired in a two-and-a-half-year delay.
more here.
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