Submission by Michel Houellebecq

[Iagogogo]

I couldn’t share the disgust he claimed to feel for the carnal passions. I couldn’t even make sense of it. Generally speaking, my body was the seat of various painful afflictions – headaches, rashes, toothaches, haemorrhoids – that followed one after another, without interruption, and almost never left me in peace – and I was only forty-four! What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I’d be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition, my life an unending torment, grim, joyless and mean. When you got right down to it, my cock was the one organ that hadn’t presented itself to my consciousness through pain, only through pleasure. Modest but robust, it had always served me faithfully.

LOL.

[Iagogogo]

Here’s a great review by KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD .

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/bo...

Why can’t I respond to literature like that?

[Iagogogo]

It doesn’t make much difference to me – I’d have had to retire in two years anyway … Obviously, it leaves a bad taste, but they’ll give me my whole pension, I’m sure, and extra pay, too. Anything to keep me from making a fuss.

Nothing really matters to him, but good food is good food

In any case, I was already looking forward to dinner the next day. The port was bound to be good, and I had high hopes for the meal itself. He wasn’t the type who took these things lightly.>

Starting to remind me of Meursault (Camus’). I think something is missing in this guy.

[Iagogogo]

Reading Huysmans and drifting into inaction .... I think I know how this is going to end.

I had drifted into a dreamy state of inaction, and even though here the hotel Internet worked fine, I wasn’t especially worried not to have heard from Myriam. In the eyes of the owner and his staff, I was a type: a bachelor, rather cultured, rather sad, without much in the way of distractions – all of which was an accurate description. In the end, I was the kind of guest who never gives you any trouble, which was all that mattered.

[Iagogogo]

Were they ready to give up everything for their country? I felt ready to give up everything, not really for my country, but in general. I was in a strange state

Haha no surprise there.

But then, that hits close to home. I kind of feel like nothing is worth hanging onto, too.

[Iagogogo]

The third letter, by contrast, held a surprise. Sent from the city hall in Nevers, it expressed its deepest condolences on the death of my mother and informed me that the body had been transported to the city coroner’s office, which I should contact in order to make the necessary arrangements. The letter was dated Tuesday, 31 May. I quickly flipped through the pile. There was one follow-up letter postmarked 14 June and another from 28 June. Finally, on 11 July the city informed me that, pursuant to article L 2223–27 of the General Local Authorities Code, the city had deposited my mother’s body in the common division of the municipal cemetery. I had five years to order the exhumation of her body and its reburial in a private plot, at the end of which time it would be cremated and the ashes scattered in a ‘garden of memory’. If I were to request this exhumation, I would be liable for the expense incurred by the municipality – one coffin, four bearers, the cost of the plot itself.
I certainly hadn’t imagined my mother leading a vibrant social life, attending conferences on pre-Columbian civilisation or making the rounds of the local Romanesque churches with other women her age. Even so, I had no idea she was so completely alone. They’d probably tried to get in touch with my father, too, and he must have left the letters unanswered. In spite of everything, it bothered me to think of her being buried in a potter’s field (this, the Internet informed me, was the former name for the common division of the municipal cemetery), and I wondered what had become of her French bulldog (humane society? euthanasia by injection?).
Next I set aside the payment-due notices and the other bills.

Yeah, no, this guy is definitely Mersault.