For readers with an interest in Francocentric views of current events.
Editorials, occasional pieces, and interviews by and with the prickly French writer.
“The logical consequences of individualism are murder and unhappiness,” Houellebecq tells an interlocutor, going on to spin out a soliloquy that takes in quantum physics, the abandonment of psychoanalysis, the molecular basis of consciousness, and the ecological disasters we’re careening toward. The author’s sententious writings are of a piece, if often more personal: He doesn’t like going to parties, for instance, and though they can be made more tolerable with a “nice dose of hallucinogenic plants,” the question still stands, “What the hell am I doing with these jerks?” Houellebecq has been deemed a reactionary, but the political stance here is a sort of Cartesian socialism with a strong dash of religion—religion not necessarily for any reason other than that it “offers the feeling of being connected to the world,” and not just any old religion, especially not Islam. It’s to that faith that Houellebecq cheerfully admits a profound hostility, and one of his best-known literary works is his 2015 novel, Submission, which depicts a France under Islamist domination thanks to colluding politicians. The author defends the right to Islamophobia, which would seem less likely to get a person cancelled in France than in the U.S., but he’s not afraid of adding fuel to that particular fire. He’s also one of the few European intellectuals to openly praise Donald Trump, though for subtle reasons: “Unlike liberals (as fanatical as Communists, in their own way), President Trump does not see free global trade as the alpha and omega of human progress.” Moreover, he adds, Trump’s weakening of ties to NATO and his isolationism leave the world stage open for France to reassert its influence. Houellebecq closes with a suitably slippery view of the Covid-19 pandemic, featuring a dour summation: “We won’t wake up, after lockdown, in a new world; it will be the same world, but a bit worse.”
For readers with an interest in Francocentric views of current events.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5095-4995-5
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
A marvelously tender memoir on suicide and loss.
An essayist and novelist turns her attention to the heartache of a friend’s suicide.
Crosley’s memoir is not only a joy to read, but also a respectful and philosophical work about a colleague’s recent suicide. “All burglaries are alike, but every burglary is uninsured in its own way,” she begins, in reference to the thief who stole the jewelry from her New York apartment in 2019. Among the stolen items was her grandmother’s “green dome cocktail ring with tiers of tourmaline (think kryptonite, think dish soap).” She wrote those words two months after the burglary and “one month since the violent death of my dearest friend.” That friend was Russell Perreault, referred to only by his first name, her boss when she was a publicist at Vintage Books. Russell, who loved “cheap trinkets” from flea markets, had “the timeless charm of a movie star, the competitive edge of a Spartan,” and—one of many marvelous details—a “thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, seemingly scalped from the roof of an English country house.” Over the years, the two became more than boss and subordinate, teasing one another at work, sharing dinners, enjoying “idyllic scenes” at his Connecticut country home, “a modest farmhouse with peeling paint and fragile plumbing…the house that Windex forgot.” It was in the barn at that house that Russell took his own life. Despite the obvious difference in the severity of robbery and suicide, Crosley fashions a sharp narrative that finds commonality in the dislocation brought on by these events. The book is no hagiography—she notes harassment complaints against Russell for thoughtlessly tossed-off comments, plus critiques of the “deeply antiquated and often backward” publishing industry—but the result is a warm remembrance sure to resonate with anyone who has experienced loss.
A marvelously tender memoir on suicide and loss.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780374609849
Page Count: 208
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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