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I immediately jump into this new section of DeBaser by suggesting a book that was released just a month ago and that I finished a few days ago. I'm talking about "The Pursuit of Happiness" by Michel Houellebecq. It is not an unpublished work, but rather a collage created by Bompiani, his Italian publisher, of all those works that have remained unpublished here - specifically, articles in newspapers and magazines, poetry collections, and short essays - which focus on the existential suffering of modern man, a key element and characteristic approach of the poetic style of the fifty-year-old French writer. For those who don't know him, Michel Houellebecq appeared on the European literary scene in the early 1990s with novels with broad philosophical and sociological connotations, all having as their main theme the contradictions and frustrations of the average Westerner, the one who "has a life like all others, a job like many others, and who sometimes, as often happens, falls into depression and gives up everything".
His novels, as well as his icy poetry collections, are certainly not easy to read, and those looking for well-defined characters and engaging plots may perhaps be disappointed: the most that this writer manages to insert to animate his stories are nevertheless well-pondered elements of uchronian science fiction. His second novel, "The Elementary Particles", imagined a future dominated by asexual beings who had liberated themselves from unhappiness simply by eliminating sexual reproduction and the pains of childbirth, as opposed to a present where boredom and destruction spread, and in which individuals live in solitude and pain overwhelmed by a social system that condemns them to competition in all areas of existence; in "The Possibility of an Island" the future belongs instead to beings completely anesthetized to the pain of living who spend their days in a sort of Nirvana, and have forgotten love, desire, and pain, what today we are most concerned with keeping alive and which, according to the French author, makes us suffer the most, but also what makes us, in the true sense of the term, "human". What distinguishes Houellebecq's critical eye is undoubtedly a historical, as well as ontological pessimism. On one hand, like other contemporary authors, Houellebecq confronts ethical and scientific problems by supporting technical progress and often proposing in his novels a vision of society dominated by technocracy; on the other, the author is aware of the direction science has taken, and knows well that anesthetizing and killing sensitivity and pain cannot generate peace nor foster happiness, but rather drag human beings deeper into loneliness and the inability to communicate and perceive the world, life, and the body, the "flesh," to use Merleau-Ponty's expression. To this, Houellebecq always opposes, in a Sartrean manner, a sexuality as manifest and flaunted as it is essential and profound, the true focal point of human relationships precisely because it is understood as the only moment of happiness, abandonment, and transport amid an ocean of pain.
Heir of Camus's "The Stranger", son of Kafka, Balzac, and Dostoevsky, devoted to Lovecraft, about whom he wrote an intriguing yet controversial biographical-critical work, Houllebecq presents himself here in the double guise of essayist and poet, two elements certainly central to his novels, and here pushed to stylistic extremes. It must be said immediately that anyone who has never delved into this author will not find in this work the right starting point. We find here texts that often have no stylistic connection - the transition from prose to Houellebecq's poetry is often almost traumatic - and, although the unified project remains to depict the current despair of man with sometimes expressionistic colors and sometimes icy and cynical ones, the idea is that Bompiani assembled the various works, originally separate from each other, based on a more commercial than real need. The initial essay "Remaining Alive", a sort of short and chilling portrait of the modern poet, intended as a master of despair, as a plague and as a knife of the human race, flows into a series of poems dominated by an almost tangible ontological yearning, ironically titled "The Pursuit of Happiness"; it is followed by a collection of interviews and short essays made over the years ("Interventions"), which serve somewhat as a philosophical and conceptual summa of the French author, but also as curious stylistic and literary experiments (to be read in this sense the captivating "White Work"); the book ends with another collection of poems, named "Rebirth", dominated on one side by an ever-present psychological and existential oppression, but also by an almost spiritual breath aimed at valuing the sense of love and the nonsensical, painful, and lacerating nature of the solitude to which man is condemned.
As mentioned, in this work all the great strengths as well as the limits and weaknesses of Michel Houellebecq recur, his Schopenhauerian vision of life, and his equally deep vein of reproach that spares no ideal, no false value, no faith - political, religious, or cultural in general - and no human product that is even partially imbued with a vein of optimism and hope (it is his famous statement that "True writers always bring bad news"). Certainly, it is a work to have for those who, like me, consider this writer one of the most profound and complex of the contemporary global scene; but it is equally true that those unfamiliar with him and wishing to delve into his work might find themselves not entirely satisfied with the success of the editorial assembly. Personally, for a first approach to the author, I recommend "Whatever", which, given its slim number of pages and narrative fluidity, can be considered the first step to enter the world of this harsh and icy narrator, who educates us to disenchantment and turmoil, to solitude and cynicism, but also to love, the primordial feeling, unhappiness as a weapon to attack the world. The first impact may be harsh, perhaps even painful, but once you enter the tunnel, it will be difficult to look at life and people with the same eyes as before.
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