Michel Houellebecq has hidden a bomb in his new novel. It does not affect women, nor religion, nor politics, although “Annihilation”, as the book is called, is very much a political novel, a story that is largely set in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs during the presidential election campaign in 2027 Rather, the bomb at the end of the book, in the last sentence of the author’s thanks, hits him himself: “I”, writes Michel Houellebecq, “have fortunately just come to a positive conclusion: for me it is time to stop.”
Does he want to stop? Now? Why? You have just flown through the 620 new pages, at an enormous pace, because “Destroy” begins with an enigmatic geometric drawing with unknown characters as a spy thriller, the possible resolution of which, even when everything seems hopeless, pushes you further – there it should be over? Also ended with this language, which some accuse of being “without style” although “the absence of style, the non-style”, as the writer Rainald Goetz called it, is Houellebecq’s actual style phenomenon? Apart from how extremely well this styleless language reads.
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