(Paris) Annihilate, the eighth novel by Michel Houellebecq, hit the shelves on Friday and looks set to get off to a flying start after having already aroused a myriad of comments and criticisms, often laudatory, sometimes harsh.
This long fiction (736 pages) anticipates the years 2026 and 2027 when “France [est] in decline ”, but the bourgeois elites are not doing so badly.
The most influential French writer in the world is not the one who sells the most books in his country. But Flammarion bet on a first considerable edition of 300,000 copies, against 400,000 in September for the national champion Guillaume Musso.
Proof of its success beyond borders: the Italian translations (Annientare), German (Vernichten) and Greek are published between Friday and Tuesday. The English will wait until the second semester.
“He’s the greatest living French writer, on the one hand. And then I think it’s counter-cultural: he’s a heterosexual white male, so that’s what we need today, ”one of his Hispanic-Argentinian fans told AFP. bought the novel Friday morning in Paris, Leonardo Orlando.
Michel Houellebecq, who cultivates an image of reactionary depression, himself mocked his success in the only interview he gave on the occasion of this publication, to the World end December.
“I write to get applause. Not for the money, but to be loved, admired ”. And to compare his job to prostitution: “We are happy to please”.
Provocations of this ilk are not lacking in Annihilate. Between misogynistic, xenophobic remarks, stings against contemporary cultural and spiritual mediocrity and contempt for the poor, the unidentified Houellebecquien narrator sends his usual share of bitterness.
Some critics, like those of Mediapart, deplored it. “All these nauseating words are distilled in small touches, as in minor mode,” they note.
Leak
Others, like that of World, found him a lot of finesse: “The most poignant pages of his novel are those where he manages to make float, in the middle of loneliness and dereliction, fleeting gestures that make you cry”.
“They don’t seem to be talking about the same book,” journalist Daniel Schneidermann concluded after reading these two extreme reviews.
The Obs, the Inrocks and Humanity did not like at all. The novelist has drifted away from the traditional views of these leftist titles.
Dailies Le Figaro and Release, yet from opposite sides, have agreed to praise a successful story, just like the magazine She or regional newspapers such West France and The voice of the North.
The critical debate is not the only one to whet the curiosity of readers.
What can be done against the piracy that made the book available before Christmas on illegal websites? Some have gone so far as to hypothesize (without any proof) that the perpetrator himself was the source of the leak.
The object conceived by Flammarion, with the directives of the writer, is it worth the comparison, often heard, with a volume of the Library of the Pleiade? This is not the opinion of all: “In truth, the book is ugly, it looks like an old edition by Ginette Mathiot, I know how to cook », According to the editor Cécile Dutheil of La Rochère in the review While waiting for Nadeau.
The buyers of the novel interviewed by AFP on Friday, mainly men, said they were primarily interested in the “content”, not the subject.
The long-awaited release should start the year well for booksellers, while the previous one ended very strongly. Many of them had to explain to their customers that no, before January 7, they were not selling the new Houellebecq.
“It allows a lot of people to enter bookstores. […] He is an author who counts, whatever his opinion, and who is part of the heritage of French literature, “the deputy director of the Parisian bookseller here, Élodie Murzi, told AFP.