The Art of Struggle
1996
First Published
3.69
Average Rating
207
Number of Pages
Translated for the first time into English, a dual-text edition of a prize-winning poetry collection from the always controversial novelist Notorious as a novelist, Michel Houellebecq was first known in France as a poet, and in many ways it is through poetry that he found his novelist's voice. The recipient of the prestigious poetry prize Prix de Flore, this collection of prose and verse pieces investigate issues of alienation, individualism, and disillusionment—themes that will be familiar to Houellebecq readers—while subtly adopting a variety of tones and styles, revealing facets of the author unknown until now in the English-speaking world. Deeply melancholic and despairing at the inhumanity of the present-day world, yet brimming with vitality and invention, these timely, poignant poems clear away the dross of hollow optimism and call for an end to the nightmare of modern existence.
Avg Rating
3.69
Number of Ratings
279
5 STARS
20%
4 STARS
42%
3 STARS
28%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
4%
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Author
Michel Houellebecq
Author · 22 books
Michel Houellebecq (born Michel Thomas), born 26 February 1958 (birth certificate) or 1956 on the French island of Réunion, is a controversial and award-winning French novelist. To admirers he is a writer in the tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire; to detractors he is a peddler, who writes vulgar sleazy literature to shock. His works though, particularly Atomised, have received high praise from the French literary intelligentsia, with generally positive international critical response, Having written poetry and a biography of the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, he brought out his first novel Extension du domaine de la lutte in 1994. Les particules élémentaires followed in 1998 and Plateforme, in 2001. After a disastrous publicity tour for this book, which led to his being taken to court for inciting racial hatred, he went to Ireland to write. He currently resides in France, where he has been described as "France’s biggest literary export and, some say, greatest living writer". In 2010 he published La Carte et le Territoire (published the same year in English as The Map and the Territory) which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt; and, in 2015, Submission.
