PARIS (dpa) – If they gave prizes for causing offence, then French writer Michel Houellebecq would be on most of the world’s short lists.
Following the publication of his third novel, “Plateforme”, the 43-year-old Houellebecq managed to outrage anti-prostitution campaigners, insult Charles de Gaulle, and, most significantly, offend France’s sizeable Moslem community.Not surprisingly, sales of the book have soared, with more than 200,000 copies sold within 10 days of publication.“Plateforme” is at once a story of doomed love, an argument for sex tourism, a polemic against globalization and Islamic fundamentalism and a bitter send-up of modern-day manners and humanitarianism.Its mood is grim, deeply ironic and often bitterly caustic.“I have a gift for insult, for provocation. Therefore I am tempted to use it,” Houellebecq told the newspaper Le Figaro, adding mischievously, “Invective is one of my great pleasures”.He exercised his pleasure vigorously in an interview printed in the September edition of the literary magazine Lire, published just as “Plateforme” reached the shelves of France’s bookshops.First, he spoke approvingly of prostitution, declaring, “It doesn’t pay badly as a job. In Thailand, it’s an honourable profession…. (The women) are nice, they give pleasure to their clients, they take good care of their parents.”Then he admitted to a preference for Marshal Philippe Petain – who collaborated with the Nazi occupiers of the country during World War II – over the hero of the French resistance and later president, Charles de Gaulle.And, finally, he attacked Islam.On a recent voyage to the Sinai, Houellebecq said, he had “suddenly experienced a total rejection of monotheism”.“I told myself,” he went on, “that the act of believing in a single God was the act of a cretin, I couldn’t find another word. And the most stupid religion of all is Islam.”He said that reading the Koran was a “shattering” experience, and went on: “Islam is a dangerous religion, and has been since its inception. Fortunately, it is condemned…. It has been eaten away on the inside by capitalism”.Reaction was swift in coming, with the Cairo newspaper al-Hayat quoting French Moslems as saying that they were looking for legal provisions to halt further sales of the book, to prevent Houellebecq from becoming a “second Salman Rushdie”.Indian-born Rushdie was condemned to death in abstentia in 1989 by the late Ayatollah Khomeini for his book “Satanic Verses”, considered blasphemous by many Moslems, but has been under police guard since and has never in fact come to harm.Other groups representing France’s 4-million-strong Islamic community – including the Arab League, the Islamic Organization for Education, Science and Culture (ISESCO) and the Grand Mufti of Marseille – all condemned the writer.“Michel Houellebecq’s statements insult Moslems throughout the world,” ISESCO’s director, Abdel-Aziz ben Othmane Twaijri, declared in a letter to UNESCO head Koichiro Matsura.“I ask you take appropriate measures to denounce (the statements) and condemn this hateful aggression.”In addition, the absence of a sufficiently vigorous reaction from France’s non-Moslems prompted the Arab League’s French representative, Nassif Hitti, to express the fear that “this indifference comes from a banalization of anti-Arab and anti-Moslem racism in France”.Houellebecq’s publisher, Flammarion, reacted swiftly, releasing a brief statement by the writer declaring, “I deny that I am a racist. I have never equated Moslems with Arabs.”He went on to accuse journalists of spreading “serious disinformation (by) intentionally confusing what the characters of my novel say and statements attributed to the author”.And what his main character – also named Michel – says is certainly eye-catching.Near the novel’s end, after the woman he loves has been killed in a bombing carried out by Islamic terrorists, he declares, “Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child, or a pregnant Palestinian woman was shot to death in the Gaza Strip, I experienced a quiver of pleasure at the thought that there was one Moslem fewer.”A spokeswoman for Flammarion’s foreign rights department said that publishers in 11 countries had already purchased the right to “Plateforme”, and negotiations were under way with numerous others, including an American publishing house.However, she said that a deal with a Turkish publisher, already completed, had to be suspended as a result of Houellebecq’s public statements.The commercial benefits of provocation are apparently limited.
