Lanzarote

Michel Houellebecq

What a weird book. I can't for the life of me remember how I came across it except that someone somewhere must have recommended it. It reminded me of a French version of Michael Bracewell's Perfect Tense. The same tendency towards introspective philosophizing which makes for very dreary reading.

One thing you notice about Michael Houellebecq is he likes a good old national stereotype. English tourists are "not interested in anything whatsoever", Germans will go "anywhere there's sun" since Germany is "cold and horrible and full of Turks", the French tourist is a "vain creature, so enamoured of himself the mere sight of a compatriot abroad is anathema to him". Later on we learn that all of Europe (and Belgium in particular) no longer constitutes any sort of society and "we no longer have anything in common but humliation and fear". I suppose some of this is quite funny if you look at it long and hard enough but who has the time or the inclination? Fortunately there's only 80-odd pages of this kind of thing.

Even then the 80 pages contain plenty of white space. A fast reader could probably get through it under an hour. To save you even that bother here's what happens. Houellebecq books a last minute holiday deal on the island of Lanzarote where he meets a Belgian policeman and two German lesbians. Vigorous and deeply depressing group sex sessions take up the middle section of the book. The book winds up with an alien-worshipping cult ensnaring the Belgian only for the cult to be unmasked as a cover for child sex abuse. Then we have an account of Lanzarote's volcanic eruption of 1731. Sounds pretentious yet? Here and there the book is illustrated with the author's own photos of Lanzarote's partly ugly partly spectacular volcanic landscape. NOW does it sound pretentious?

The only character in the book you can even remotely bring yourself to care about is the island itself, with its strange lunar landscape. On occasions even Houellebecq seems to lose interest. After several paragraphs of musings on whether life on earth had extra-terrestrial origins Houellebecq declares "I didn't know whether such theories had been proven or refuted, and to be honest, I didn't really give a shit". Indeed.