Michel Houellebecq: Whatever

Michel Houellebecq is something of a phenomenon in his native France. He’s been described as the man responsible for influencing and mentoring a new generation of French writers. This is the English translation of his novella L’extension du domaine de la lutte, a novella that I briefly considered translating before I found out that: a) it had already been translated, and b) it’s not really very good.

The story centres on the narrator, a computer programmer, who deals with the little conundrums and foibles of working life in an overly exasperated way. Working life goes from bad to worse, though, when he’s told that his next job will involve working with the ministry of agriculture to train its staff on a new piece of software. Cue lots of travelling around rural France (well, that just means France, really) and poking fun at farmers, as the narrator struggles to find any sort of point in what he’s doing. The blurb compares it to Camus’ L’Etranger, and there are certain similarities between the narrator and Mersault. L’Etranger, however, is an incredibly good book. Whatever, to reiterate, falls short on that account.

The problem isn’t that this is a self-referential, stodgy, wading-through-treacle type wankfest in the Salmon Rushdie vein as you might expect from a French post-modern work. It’s much more approachable than that. Houellebecq’s PR machine paints him as a chronicler of modern life and society, as an ironic truth-sayer who dares to point out the faults in our post-modern society. He writes about dysfunctional types with low-paid jobs and no joie de vivre. And that’s an apt description of what this novella does. The PR machine, though, fails to point out that, frankly, there’s nothing new here. I've already pointed out a comparison to Camus, but this book, and Houellebecq's work as a whole, is more in line with gen-x literature, so let's add a few more recent names: Douglas Coupland was doing the same thing years ago; Haruki Murakami built his career on it; Will Self does it, and with a great deal more wit. Perhaps it’s just the French catching on to a fashion 15 years too late. It wouldn’t be that surprising. But more likely, it’s a case of the truth being a novelty in France, whereas for most of the rest of the world, it’s old hat. (But I’m going to talk about modern French society when I review The Dreamers – yes, I’m really trying to build up some hype for that post.)

But that’s only half the problem here. The second is a truly amateurish translation. Without droning on endlessly about translation techniques and methods and the theories surrounding literary translation, Paul Hammond seems to be ignorant of the key linguistics differences between French and English. He sticks too tightly to French diction and syntax, through either unawareness of said differences or some misguided notion of fidelity. The result would have been fine 150 years ago, when English was more hung-up on being like Latin, but for a translation of a modern work the language is clunky, and sounds unnatural. A little research shows that Hammond is actually principally a translator of Spanish and lives in Madrid. So, obviously, he’s eminently qualified to translate a French novella, then…

But as for Houellebecq, I really don’t see what the fuss is about. Whatever indeed.