Michel Houellebecq: “It is with good feelings we make good literature”

The writer, World Star of contemporary French literature, confides in the “world” exclusively, shortly before the publication on January 7 to “annihilate”, his new novel. First component of a two-part meeting.

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On the bed with crumpled sheets there is a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, an ashtray overflowing with megots, a remote control, a pair of glasses, a pajamas in a ball and also, dressed in a set in jeans that has Manifestly already well lived, Michel Houellebecq. Litually folded knees, the World Star of contemporary French literature shoots on his cigarette and suddenly interrupts what she was saying to see, without too articulate, “I’m lying, you’re sitting, it’s a bit Bizarre anyway, I feel like making a psychoanalysis, there. “

It is indeed all the more disturbing as, from the beginning of our meeting in the Parisian studio where the writer wrote annihilate, a new novel as thick (730 pages) that exalting, he tells me his Dreams. It must be said that his book, political thriller who turns to metaphysical meditation, is full. Page after page, we are propelled in the dreamlike adventures of the main character, Paul reason, 47 years old, senior official at the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, who will gradually come out of his existential emptiness, and reconnect with his father, by confronting death. Dreams were already found there in past books, elementary or serotonin particles, but this is the first time that Houellebecq uses them so systematic: “I do not interested too much in Freud, I have a lot reproaches to him, “he said,” but I’m really interested in dreams, and I am very happy to have put it as much in annihilating. The dream is at the origin of any fictional activity. That’s why J ‘have always thought that everyone is creative, because everyone rebuilt fiction from real and unreal elements. It’s an important point. I write when I wake up. I’m still a little In the night, I still have something of the dream. I have to write before taking a shower, in general as soon as we washed it’s fucked, we are no longer good at nothing. “

A sincere laughter, ingenuous

So it’s in this smoky antho, on this bed, that Houellebecq dreamed annihilated. To settle in the office where he worked, and where I will listen to him for five hours before continuing to the restaurant, he had only one step to do. On the wall of this studio located in the Asian district of 13 e arrondissement, and desperately furnished, we can still contemplate the photos that accompanied it during the writing of the novel. It is seen, among other things: Bruno the mayor in his ministry, that Houellebecq has been drafted for a long time and whose labyrinthal corridors provide matter at one of Paul Reason’s dreams; The Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativity Church of Bercy, not far from there, where the same Paul finds confirmation that it is definitely unfolded for hope; Carrie-Anne Moss, the actress who plays Trinity in Matrix, whose paul woman, caution, one of the most admirable characters of the novel, is the spit portrait; a hospital room to host patients in “chronic vegetative” (EVC), where Paul’s father, Edouard’s reason, former secret services silenced by a cerebroral accident, at the very moment when the world is destabilized by a series of enigmatic attacks; Or the landscapes of Beaujolais, green hills and scarlet vines, which will soon house Paul’s poignant reunion with his father.

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/Media reports.