Michel Houellebecq’s Platform
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009“If the general climate is bad, all will be affected by it. Men and women of letters are not expected to do more than they can, as they express this bad situation in their literary production. With respect to the question of the appeal of a particular work, the whole thing depends on whether the text itself is good and capable of expressing reality; it is not a problem of literature or writers only but is a symptom of the crisis of society as a whole.”1
Naguib Mahfouz’s comments on the so called ‘crisis of the novel’ are a useful starting point to discuss Michel Houellebecq’s third book Platform, not least because its tone – perfectly plausible in the context of a literary interview – is strikingly similar to much of the ‘dialogue’ in this inflammatory novel. This is a novel about race and culture, in which the few characters who are actually given a voice [...]
