Art Friday
August 31st, 2007 |Best novel read in 2007:
Tolstoy begins “Anna Karenina” with: “Every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way”.
Merot starts “Mammals” with: “Every model family should have a fuck-up: a family without a fuck-up is not truly a family, because it lacks an element that challenges it, thereby reinforcing its legitimacy”. –staking claim to a contemporary accounting of the human experience. The protagonist–”The Uncle”–goes on to say that:
he wishes his mother would pursue her obsession with disease and her tedious blather in the realm of the dead. Not that a splinter is so easily removed from the soul, but the physical passing of a person certainly has distinct advantages.
The uncle has chalked up a number of fuck-ups that serve to reassure the family in their own just and noble life chices: unemployment, divorce, adsence of decendants, cohabitating with divorcees, abortive attempts to fit into single-parent families, etc..
The novel essentially follows The Uncle through his life as accounted by him in a sort of anthropological view of human behavior. Sabotaging family units, tedious work-place environments, relationships that are failed before they begin, and the overall banality of modern life in which the individual plays more of a role than anything else renders The Uncle more-or-less impotent and bitter, though hilarious.
The Uncle on employment:
Work is one of the principal causes of misery, the other is love.
The preamble to the Constitution of the Fourth Republic, still in effect states, “Everyone shall have the duty to work and the right to obtain employment.” Luckily, unemployment turned up to challenge this hypocrisy.
A handful of assholes terrorize the whole planet through work. The worst offenders are the people who have no financial or political motive. Intense feelings of frustration turn them into workaholics and they cannot bear people who aren’t like them This is a phenomenon that affects every level of humanity. Listen to a Portuguese foreman yelling from a scaffolding rig: he is a vicious, uncultivated animal, and the world would be a better place if someone pushed him off.
The Uncle on the ruling class:
What is a CEO? A CEO is someone who would like you to work twelve hours a day for the price of six. He criticizes the state and the government while going cap in hand to them for subsidies. His bidet factory exists only to fund the lavish lifestyle of his family of morons. All of his children have their own cars, fail their baccalaureat three times, spend long periods in the United States, and look down their noses at you.
The Uncle on democracy:
What is democracy? It is one more on the list of things that make you throw up. In a democratic country, the head of state tells his fellow citizens how much he earns and how much tax he pays. It is a commendable gesture. Among the many possible definitions, a modern democracy is a political system in which prodigiously educated, profoundly lucid, and perfectly disinterested citizens elect a representative who will earn more in a year than most of them will see in a lifetime. Besides which, he’s usually exposed as a crook and jumps bail.
In the Houellebecq school of contemporary French novelists, this is definitely the best novel I have read this year.
One Response to “Art Friday”
thanks for the tip.