"Donald Trump is a good president", Michel Houellebecq delivers final "thoughts"
Euthanasia, the American elections, Éric Zemmour ... In Interventions 2020, the 64-year-old novelist expresses his positions on contemporary society. He swears it will be the last time.
Michel Houellebecq is back in bookstores on Wednesday with a collection of essays and various positions, Interventions 2020, which he swears will be the last of its kind. Jean-Paul Sartre had his Situations (I, II, III, etc.). Michel Houellebecq has his "Interventions", except that he will not leave ten volumes as the philosopher had done.
After Interventions (149 pages, published in 1998), Interventions 2 (285 pages, published in 2009) and this 2020 Interventions which is the update (450 pages), "there will be no fourth edition", ensures the 64-year-old novelist.
"I don't absolutely promise to stop thinking, but at least to stop communicating my thoughts and opinions to the public, except in a serious moral emergency - for example a legalization of euthanasia (I don't think it there are others, in the time I have left to live), ”he writes on the back cover.
Michel Houellebecq is a fierce opponent of euthanasia, as he explains in the last text of this volume, entitled “The Vincent Lambert affair should not have taken place”. Not by faith, since he is an atheist, but "for obvious moral reasons". "Our duty to take care of these patients, to provide them with the best possible living conditions," he said.
No need to go looking for a provocation never seen or a nugget that was missing from his work: no text is unpublished. Houellebecq takes up, at a time when few people still think so, a "Donald Trump is a good president" published in Harper's Magazine in January 2019. The writer says his support with the unconventional diplomacy of the American president, with his attitude conciliatory vis-à-vis Russian President Vladimir Poutine, and with his mistrust of free trade and European construction.
Similarly, he praises Eric Zemmour, today in turmoil after yet another diatribe. He sees in the polemicist the “most interesting contemporary avatar” of “non-Christian Catholics” admiring the Church without believing in God. This in a “conversation” in May 2019 with the editorial director of the weekly Valeurs contemporaine, Geoffroy Lejeune.
These positions, the most recent, allow us to feel a right-wing evolution according to Les Inrockuptibles, a magazine classified on the left where Houellebecq was once free to put down his pen.
"At the risk of feeling, again, our little heart breaking, remarks the cultural weekly, ten years ago, when Michel Houellebecq intervened, it was in Les Inrocks, to speak above all about literature and denounce liberalism."
To echo the literary news, Houellebecq also speaks of his colleague Emmanuel Carrère, star of this literary season, in a contribution to a 2018 book on the author of Other lives than mine. "It is in any case impossible to retrace the facts, even when doing it without any literary ambition, one is always obliged to invent, more or less", he writes, two years before the controversies on the part of fiction and reality in the novel Yoga.
The circulation of Interventions 2020 is modest: 14,000 copies, according to the specialized monthly Livres Hebdo, while Serotonin, in January 2019, had started with 320,000. A novel that appears in my pocket at I read, this Wednesday, October 7.
