Whatever: A Novel

Michel Houellebecq

sty 2011 · Profile Books

Informacje o e-booku

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life and a bad attitude, the anti-hero of Whatever smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by trade, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system. Houellebecq's first novel was a smash hit in France, expressing the misanthropic voice of a generation. As in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Whatever's exasperated narrator vociferously expresses his frustration and disgust with the world. Opinionated and provocative, Michel Houellebecq was awarded the Prix Goncourt, the most important French literary prize, in 2010.'A cult...astonishing' TIME OUT'Slips down easily like a bad oyster' GUARDIAN'The mischief-making enfant terrible of new-wave fiction' INDEPENDENT

O autorze

Novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq was born in 1958, on the French island of Reunion. At the age of six, Michel was given over to the care of his paternal grandmother, a communist, whose family name he later adopted. His literary career began when, at twenty, he started to move in poetic circles in France. Whatever, Houellebecq's first novel, has been translated into several languages. Houellebecq's second collection of poems, Le sens du combat (The Meaning of the Fight), obtained the Prix Flore in 1996. In 1998, he received the prestigious Grand Prix National des Lettres Jeunes Talents for his literary work. He has also won the Prix Novembre (for The Elementary Particles ). His first album, Presence humaine, was released in 2000. He currently lives in Ireland.