The “ageing enfant terrible” of French literature is in trouble with his “old slut of a mother” (again):
[Michel] Houellebecq was later raised in a grey French suburb by his paternal grandmother, whose surname he took in her honour. In his bestselling novel Les Particules élémentaires, translated as Atomised and made into a film in 2006, he created a loathsome, selfish, sexually voracious mother character who pointedly has the same surname as his mother, Ceccaldi.
The fictional mother finds “the burden of caring for a small child” incompatible with “personal freedom”. She leaves her young son in an attic room, eventually abandoning her children in favour of sex with young men and life in a dubious commune.
Now Lucie Ceccaldi, 83, who lives in a beach hut in La Réunion, has hit back with her own book, L’Innocente- the Innocent - in which she gives her version of her life and her son.
In a vicious postscript she writes: “Michel and I could begin to talk to each other again the day he goes to a public square with Les Particles élémentaires in his hand and says: ‘I am a liar, I am an imposter, I’ve done nothing in my life except do bad to the people around me, and I ask for forgiveness.’ Killing your mother was in fashion at the time.”
The French literary world is intrigued by the latest round in Houellebecq’s personal drama - his parents, absent for 30 years, wrote to him after Atomised was published, but he said he didn’t read the letters and stuffed them in a box.
The first extracts from Ceccaldi’s book are due to be published in the literary magazine Lire this week. The news weekly L’Express called it “reckoning at the Houellebecq Corral”. It was reported that several other publishers declined to take on the book for fear of offending him.
As The First Post note, Houellebecq has not responded and probably won’t.
On his blog in 2006, following the publication of an unflattering biography of him to which she contributed, he said of her: “She is too egocentric to produce a significant account of anything other than herself.”
Further: Lee Rourke on why Houellebecq’s bad sex scenes are a joy to read
First posted: Monday, April 28th, 2008.
