Lanzarote (2000)

A short narrative (as short as holidays are), it is a kind of manual of discomfort. A clinical - and at times obscene - observation of a holiday in a resort in the Canary Islands.

We travel, through the narrator's eyes, across an arid territory, both geographical and human, and find in mass tourism a perfect portrait of contemporary decadence: people reduced to consumers, sex turned into a pastime, spirituality replaced by grotesque cults. 

You will find neither empathy nor beauty. Instead, the world stripped to the bone. The ridicule and mediocrity that fuel the comfort of the West. (will you see yourself there?)

The volcanic landscape of Lanzarote, a beautiful but inhospitable space, where nothing flourishes beyond solitude and repetition. The book is short, but the effect it leaves is long-lasting.

Michel Houellebecq, born in 1956 on the island of Réunion, is the great iconoclast of contemporary French letters. They call him a nihilist, a provocateur, even a pornographer of human misery. He merely points his finger at the emptiness of modernity: at sexuality without affection, at religion transformed into marketing, at politics emptied of ideas. His writing is corrosive, it insists on not anesthetizing, on not softening what we all sense but avoid naming. In Houellebecq, there are no utopias or comforts - only the cold observation that we live in a civilization tired of itself.