Archive for July 2, 2011
THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND by Michel Houellebecq
It’s often said that a critic has no place christening contemporary works as literature; it’s for future generations to decide which books will live on and which will fall the way of obscurity. According to this line of thinking, 19th- century Russians were just as incapable of heralding their literary giants as the ancient Greeks were of immortalizing Homer or the Elizabethans, Shakespeare. But there’s something in this argument I’ve always found hard to believe: great literature lives on not because it’s incidentally suited to future tastes or historically informative; it lives on because it captures some of that elusive essence of what it is to be human, and while that universal quality all literature possesses is hard to pin down, to paraphrase Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it. Tolstoy’s contemporaries knew what they held in their hands with WAR AND PEACE just as I knew what I held in mine the first time I picked up a book by Jose Saramago. So let me be clear: Michel Houellebecq is such a writer and THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND is a book that will be read for generations to come.
July 2, 2011
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Judi Clark · 
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Tags: 2011 Favorites, A.I., Knopf, love, Michel Houellebecq, Speculative (Beyond Reality) · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Translated, Unique Narrative, World Literature
