The Possibility of an island

the Possibility of an island is the Romance fourth of Michel Houellebecq, published in 2005 with the editions Fayard. It tackles the subject of the cloning and the artificial creation of a new species while continuing the reflection of the author on the contemporary company, in particular on the relations between the men and the women.

Presentation

Daniel, which lives at the beginning of the 21e century, writes his autobiography or “account of life”. It tells there its career of comic professional like his intimate life and its relations with a sect, Élohimites. Many centuries later, one of its descendants clones, Daniel24, read the account of life of Daniel and its own comment adds to it.

Detailed synopsis

This long novel is built on the account of life of Daniel 1 whom cut and prolong of the comments of other Daniel registered in a chain of clones (Daniel 23,24 and especially Daniel 25 which saw several millenia after the original).
By successive chapters headings “Daniel 1,1” to “Daniel 1,28” - what, obviously, constitutes a wink with the biblical locations - the central figure tells the stages of his adult life with his designs of the world and his states of heart; the book being completed on the account of life of Daniel 25 who is used as épilogue.
Comic professional at the end of the 20th century, Daniel 1 exploits the provocation in sketches on Palestinians and Israelis, the Opus Dei and the Maffia or on the pornography and the lolitas, which leads it to success and fortune. Lucid and cynical, he speaks about him like “Zarathoustra of the middle-classes” (p. 412), specifying page 164: “if one attacks the world with a sufficient violence, it ends up spitting it, its dirty money”. Misfit in a world which loses the direction nietzschéen vital force and refuses procreation more and more, struck by the separation of the erotism and the tenderness of the postmodern time, it cannot make a success of his connections with Isabelle then with Esther, without finding either exaltation in a sexuality hygiénique.
More and more, it feels overpowered “the melancholy, apathy languide and finally mortal of generations désincarnées” (p. 440) while dreaming at the same time of “the possibility of an island” which lights, on page 433, last worms of the last poem sent before its suicide by Daniel 1 to Esther, the woman whom it loves and who escapes to him: “There exists in the middle of the temps/La possibility of an island”).
This desire very explicitly baudelairien of one elsewhere, the fact of looking with interest and benevolence concepts of the sect of Élohimites, transparent transposition of the Rael iens. The author also describes with more recreation than of critic the operation of the sect with his sexual guru dominating, his scientists convinced and his handling of the followers as at the time of disappearance of the prophet assassinated by a sexual rival and than one claims réincarné in the young Vincent artist who will continue the search of Élohimites which gives up all of course their goods with the sect which promises the éternité.
to them The sect richissime arranges indeed with Lanzarote, an island of the Canaries to the moderate and equal climate, a embassy to accommodate Elohims whose followers await the return which will mark the end of time for humanity. These extraterrestrial creators of humanity have the secrecy of the eternal life and the sect advances itself in this way while misant on the cloning of the elected officials starting from their DNA, which offers a succession of certified existences of copies. The novelist imagines the success of the process since he proposes the comments of Daniel 25 to us which evoke of the Marie 22 or Esther 23. Wearied of its empty existence, without objective and fastener, Daniel 1 commits suicide, opening, by a nondefinite decision, the door with successive reincarnations thehuman ones released by solar energy and the capsules long life of rock salt of poor and painful energy production of the alimentation-digestion.
The apologue is consisted the account of life of Daniel 25 who only leaves to research a island-paradise while côtoyant without binding to them residues of humanity turned over to the age of fire in the middle of the ruins of the year 2000. The book is completed on this impossibility of an island: “Happiness was not a possible horizon”.

Analyzes and comments

the Possibility of an island is a long novel of almost 500 pages at the same time social satire and morals of our world, tells philosophico-monk and expression of an existential lack baudelairien.

the Narration uses the process become conventional of the mixed accounts having different speakers shifted in time. The set of themes, as for it, is reduced to some points: an approach of anarchist of right-hand side (the expression is of the author himself) on a world in decline, an apologue on humanity to come with planet from néo-human - better from the worlds in failure. Some critical disputed also the richness of the imagination of the author and testified to embarrassment as for its evocation of the operation of the sect which transposes the movement raélien. ,
the reflection on a world which does not have any more the desire of future through the children, more place for the feeling in love and soon more pleasure is, without it being really original, richer. This pessimism houellebecquien is the point most extremely of the novel which makes us touch the true lack of the author who, returned of his personal experiences, does not find more serenity of the Buddhist vacuum out of the world that romantic fusion with the beauty of the things or projection in a religious faith. It is this painful perception of the human condition, placed besides without ambiguity in the line of Baudelaire on page 409, which makes the interest of the poet who is also - and undoubtedly especially - Michel Houellebecq as the suggestive force of certain sentences confirms it. For example: “And at the time when the sun settled, went up on the sea, I felt for the first time, still obscure, remote, veiled, as an emotion which was connected with the hope” (p. 390) or “space comes, approaches and seeks to devour me. There is a small noise in the center of the part. The phantoms are there, they constitute space, they surround me. They nourish burst eyes of the men” (p. 428).

In conclusion, the novel does not disorientate the amateurs of Houellebecq: anti-hero sharing the cynicism assumed of the author and his taste for the social observation, importance of the sexual scenes, humor, inscription of the characters and the situations within the framework of a theory of the social relations, radical pessimism supported here by many references to Schopenhauer. the Possibility of an island is placed in the line of the Elementary particles insofar as the novel describes a fundamental transformation of humanity, whereas Extension of the field of the fight or Plateforme was interested in the destiny of a group limited characters.

a novel of Houellebecq:

As with its practice, Houellebecq tackles polemical subjects by criticizing some of its contemporaries openly or by effleurant subjects difficult to approach for its time such as the Pédophilie or the Inceste, quickly evoked. The main new thing of this novel is the topic of the Secte S. It takes as a starting point the raëliens to imagine the “Élohimites”, of which it gives a rather positive image. However, strongly affected by the lawsuit which had been brought to him in 2002 following certain declarations on the Islam, it seems, as its main character which built his reputation of comic on sulfurous sketches, to want to avoid going too far in the provocation.

Quotations

“As for the human rights , obviously, I did not have anything with foutre of it; it is hardly if I managed to interest me in the rights of my prick. ” (p. 24)
“freedom, with personal capacity, I was rather against ; it is amusing to note that in fact always the adversaries of freedom are, at one time or with another, to have for it more the need. ” (p. 48)
“the child is a kind of vicious dwarf, of an innate cruelty, at which immediately find worst milked species, and whose pets are diverted with a wise prudence. ” (p. 67)
“the M.E.N. (Movement of Extermination of the Dwarves) the disappearance of the human, irremediably disastrous race preached with the balance of the biosphere, and its replacement by a species of bears supérieurement intelligent - research had been undertaken in parallel in laboratory in order to develop the intelligence of the bears, and in particular to give access to them the language (I thought of Gerard Depardieu in the role of the chief of the bears). ” (p. 68)
“Youth, beauty, force: the criteria of the physical love are exactly the same ones as those of the Nazism. ” (p. 74)
“the difference in age was the last taboo, the ultimate limit, all the more strong as it remained the last, and that it had replaced all the others. In the modern world one could be an exchanger, Bi, trans, zoophile, SM, but it was interdict to be old . ” (p. 213)
“the love not shared is a hemorrhage. ” (p. 316)
“undoubtedly the love it had never been, like pity according to Nietzsche, but one fiction invented by the weak ones to make feel guilty the forts, to introduce limits with their natural freedom and their ferocity. ” (p. 341)
“As each year maintaining the summer was canicular in France, and as each year the old men died in mass, fault of care, in their hospitals and their old people's homes; but that did already a long time that one had ceased being indignant some, it was to some extent passed in manners , like a means altogether natural to reabsorb a statistical situation of very great old age inevitably prejudicial to the economic equilibrium of the country. ” (p. 351)

Sales

Its editor announced sales of 200.000 specimens, total which should be reached during 2006.

Price

This novel was strongly had a presentiment of for the most prestigious literary prizes, in particular the Prix Goncourt which was finally decreed with Three days in my mother of François Weyergans. It obtained however, which of any regarded as a consolation prize, the Interallied Prix 2005.

Bonds

Critical of '' the Possibility of an island '' in Reading
Critical '' the Possibility of an island '' in lelitteraire.com
Official site of the film '' the Possibility of an island ''
'' the Possibility of an island '' on Internet Movie Database

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