Interventions (Houellebecq book)  

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Interventions is a collection of texts by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, including essays, interviews and polemical articles. The book exists in three versions, published in 1998, 2009 and 2020. The later versions are mainly expansions with new material, although a few texts only appear the earlier editions. The third version, Interventions 2020, was published in English in 2022.

Background

The French writer Michel Houellebecq came to public attention in the 1990s. His first novel Whatever was published in 1994, and although it initially received little attention, it gradually became renowned over the next few years. When his second novel Atomised was published in 1998, it became a major literary event in France, was printed in 177,000 copies and sold to many countries. It launched Houellebecq to prominence and made him a subject of much analysis in the media, where he was described as controversial, as a new trend and as an example of nihilist literature.

Publication

The first version of Houellebecq's text collection Interventions was published by Éditions Flammarion in 1998. A new version, expanded with new content and a few texts from the first version removed, appeared through Flammarion in 2009 as Interventions 2. In 2020, Flammarion published a further expanded version as Interventions 2020. This version was published in a pocket edition by Template:Ill in 2022 under the title Interventions. Interventions 2020 is the only version that exists in English translation. It was translated by Andrew Brown and published by Polity in 2022.

Contents

The English titles and publication info for the texts in Interventions 2020 are from the "Sources" section of that book.

Reception

Interventions received little attention when the first version was published in 1998. It appeared soon after Houellebecq's novels Whatever and Atomised had become subjects of international discussions and it was marketed as a key to the "real Houellebecq". Alexander Müller of literaturkritik.de said it will disappoint people who approach it for that reason, comparing it negatively to Houellebecq's novels in its analyses of social processes. He praised its "aggressive style" and analytical abilities in some passages, but said it contains platitudes and "has little to offer other than the anti-Americanism that is widespread in France". Carole Sweeney says its texts have similar themes as Whatever and Houellebecq's earlier prose work Rester vivant (1991). These 1990s works address mechanistic and individualistic worldviews as existential threats and analyze how the logic of markets affects sexuality.

At the publication of Interventions 2, Sébastien Lapaque of Le Figaro described Houellebecq as one of few French writers who defy the zeitgeist by being "bad boys", together with Maurice G. Dantec, Richard Millet, Marc-Édouard Nabe, Christian Laborde, Benoît Duteurtre and Gérard Oberlé. He said Interventions 2 elucidates both Houellebecq's novels and his "art of war". In L'Obs, Maud Granger Remy wrote that the title Interventions 2 is misleading, because it is not a sequel but an expansion of the existing Interventions, and the 17 added texts are also republications. She said the collection is incoherent and some texts suffer from being taken out of context, such as the afterword to the SCUM Manifesto, which she called beautiful but without relevance when it is not read together with the manifesto itself. Granger Remy criticized the publisher for recycling and relabelling material in a way that is dishonest and unworthy of Houellebecq, whose other books she described as "truly coherent, aesthetically and ideologically".

When Interventions 2020 was published, David Caviglioli and Grégoire Leménager of L'Obs used it to analyze Houellebecq's changing affinites over three decades. They group the texts into four periods: an early phase with "the communist press", the 1990s with Les Inrockuptibles, from the early 2000s with Le Figaro, and finally with Valeurs actuelles, which they call "Lepenist and Identitarian". David Sexton of The Spectator says the book's promotion of love and kindness makes Houellebecq appear "far from the depressive slut with an odd knack for prophecy that he is still eagerly reported to be in the British press".