Extension du domaine de la lutte [Whatever]

Paris, Maurice Nadeau, (August) 1994.
1 vol. (135 x 210 mm) of 180 p. and [2] f. Paperback, illustrated cover.

First edition.
First printing in August 1994 (followed by three reprints in September, October and December).

We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.

At the end of the summer of 1994, Maurice Nadeau published the first novel by a young man, Michel Houellebecq, a former student at the Institut national d’agronomie and still a civil servant at the Assemblée nationale. Three years earlier, Houellebecq had already published an essay on Lovecraft and two collections of poems (Rester vivant and La Poursuite du bonheur), which included the seminal alexandrine: ‘Mon père était un con solitaire et barbare’ (‘My father was a solitary, barbaric cunt’).

Then, finally, there was talk of a first novel. It was to be Extension du domaine de la lutte, which paints, with disturbing realism, the sexual and emotional misery of the Western male in the generalised competition of liberalism: a world of nightclubs and shopping centres, where the narrator, who ‘feels like a cellophane-wrapped chicken leg in a supermarket aisle’, evokes the world around him in a white, descriptive and analytical style that perfectly captures the anomie in which his days languish. The young computer scientist understands his misfortune, but is powerless against it. ‘A complete theory of unbridled liberalism, whether economic or sexual,’ Houellebecq sums up.

Perfect condition, as issued.
Rare as it is.