Traditionally, the peak of publishing life in France falls at the end of August. On the occasion of the famous to the tenant (one of the few words in Voltaire’s language that everyone in Europe still knows) most of the books appear. French authors who hope that in this way they will disprove the prophecy of the imminent demise of the Hexagon culture, secretly also hoping that the success of their works will be so great that they will be translated into English as soon as possible. As with authors from other countries. Like it or not, translating a novel into English anywhere in the world is a testament to success.

The year 2022 was announced a little differently. Perhaps also because the pandemic that made Hemingway invalid (for almost two years Paris was by no means afêhimself) showed signs of retreat. If 521 titles appeared in August 2021, then in January readers had 545 new novels at their disposal. Including yearThis isanti-Russian he was, without the slightest doubt, first on the list. 300,000 copies of the first edition of the book, which in the version from Flammarion it was over 700 pages long and disappeared from the shelves like a fish. why However, three years have passed since then Seratonin, about 11 years after the mysterious staged disappearance of the writer, so everyone wanted to know how Houellebecq’s work developed. He still wanted to know what Houellebecq was writing about. About the pandemic, about the disease, about death, about the current political life, which is becoming more and more stormy (let’s not forget that the country had to go through two rounds of elections), about the rise of the far right? About the burden of old age and is it because the writer is no longer very young? He is turning 65 years old.

There are all kinds of critics, both genuine and goodwillThis is they quickly wrote about Houellebecq’s book. They mostly saw her good side, elegantly glossing over the less laudable. On the fourth cover of the Romanian edition of the book, published in October, coll Denise shelf from Humanitas (in a very good translation by Daniel Nicolescu, Annihilation only a little more than 500 pages) is a selection with positive reviews (how else?) from Charlie Hebdo, Le Soir and The story of Figaro.

Houellebecq wanted to please everyone. So, using a unifying figure named Paul Reason, apparently a rather silly high-ranking official in the Treasury, a trusted friend, confidant of the minister concerned, Annihilation it’s also a novel about a terrorist threat via the Internet, that is, of sorts thriller (the track is quickly abandoned), and about marital crises (they also appear in the life of a priest named Bruno Huguet, and in the life of Paul), and about religious diversity, and about social stratification (this, although the narrative is mostly absorbed in the good world of Paris , a world free from too many financial worries in any case), and about the misery in hospitals (hence Paul’s family’s decision to remove him by unorthodox methods from an institution intended for the elderly on the father of the family, the victim of a stroke, hence the suicide of Aurelien, the youngest brother, hence also Paul’s self-removal from his position), as well as about political arrangements and disturbances and advisors in the field, as well as about the search for a spouse (Paul reconciles with his wife, Prudence, who for about 10 years was for him more than someone else’s), and, above all, about the beginning, path and end of the road to death. A death that neither medical science, nor the best doctors or eminent professors, nor the latest equipment can do anything to eradicate.

In the last part of the book (as in the sequence devoted to the paralysis of the father), Houellebecq returns, perhaps a little less cynically, to some of the themes also discussed in Elementary particles since 1998, and in Seratonin (2019). The account of Paul’s sufferings, of the inevitability of death, occupies about 200 pages of the more than 700 pages of the French version of the book.

Action or please action Annihilation will take place in 2027. What will be the new election year… Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro