Extension du domaine de la lutte
Accompanied by: a photograph of Houellebecq as a young man — 1 color digital print (115 x 75 mm) — with the autograph inscription: “pour Hélène, une photo que je suis bien incapable de dater, Michel Houellebecq.”
At the end of summer 1994, Maurice Nadeau published the first novel of a young man, a former student at the Institut national d’agronomie and then a civil servant at the Assemblée nationale: Michel Houellebecq. Three years earlier, Houellebecq had already published an essay on Lovecraft and two collections of poems (Rester vivant and La Poursuite du bonheur), which contained this foundational alexandrine: “Mon père était un con solitaire et barbare.”
At last came the first novel: Extension du domaine de la lutte, which portrays, with unsettling realism, the sexual and emotional misery of the Western male caught in the generalized competition of liberalism — a world of nightclubs and shopping malls, where the narrator, who feels “like a chicken thigh under cellophane on a supermarket shelf,” describes the world around him in a flat, descriptive and analytical style that perfectly conveys the anomie in which his days stagnate. The young computer programmer understands his own unhappiness but remains powerless before it. Houellebecq summed it up as “a complete theory of unbridled liberalism, whether economic or sexual.”
Fine condition, as issued.
Rare in this state.