“Naked as a worm”: scandal author Houellebecq and his horror as a porn actor Biden does not want to apologize for the atomic bomb in Hiroshima

Save his reputation. Fix what can be fixed. With this motivation, Michel Houellebecq will publish his latest work in French this Wednesday: “Quelques mois dans ma vie” – “a few months in my life”. The subtitle specifies: from October 2022 to March 2023. So long as France’s most-read author experienced “hell” by his own description.

It is a strange book, only 103 pages long, written all in black, more chronicle than literature but more sincere than any novel, full of shame, revenge and hatred, as he himself writes. It is a bitter reckoning with the Dutch artist collective Kirac, wielded with Houellebecq’s most powerful weapon: his words. In the end, however, the great, so provocative and eloquent star author stands there as a pathetic figure, or as the right-wing Parisian magazine L’Iincorrect puts it: “Naked as a worm”.

It all started on October 6 with an email from Kirac manager Stefan Ruitenbeek to Houellebecq. The 67-year-old French scandal author soon agreed to play herself in an erotic art film – having sex. The result was seen in a sickeningly aestheticized trailer Kirac posted online earlier this year; it shows a confused and crying Houellebecq chewing a cigarette and then making love to a woman in bed under a blanket.

Houellebecq only calls the woman in his book “la Truie”, the mother sow. “Maybe she would have liked to have earned the beautiful name ‘bitch’,” writes her bedfellow. “In reality she wasn’t even a naughty slut, it was worse”: she wanted to sell the sex tape on the controversial Onlyfans platform.

Houellebecq only wants to know that later. Likewise the bad intentions of two other women, named “Pute” and “Viper”, as well as Ruitenbeek’s intention to put the filmed sex scenes online.

The contract says: His penis must never be shown with his face

Houellebecq’s catch: he had given written permission himself. He even prints the contract in his book. He gets things down to the last detail: “The faces of Michel Houellebecq and Lysis Houellebecq are never shown together with Michel’s penis or Lysis’ vagina,” says point 1.3. Houellebecq later claimed that he only signed the contract while under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

But even weeks later, he was still involved in the shootings in Paris and Amsterdam. As he writes now, he then wondered, “What am I doing here with these idiots?” Van Ruitenbeek – whom he only calls “Cafard”, in German: the cockroach – he felt cheated, abused, cheated. First he filed a lawsuit in Paris for invasion of privacy. He was rejected, reached a court in Amsterdam, but it also found the contract valid.

Houellebecq thought he was completely trapped when he saw another erotic Kirac film called “Honeypot”: it ridiculed, even humiliated, the right-wing Dutch philosopher Sid Lukassen. And doesn’t Houellebecq himself have a reputation for sympathizing with the Islamophobic right wing? In France, an investigation was only recently published in which the journalist François Krug Houellebecq and the Parisian local luminaries Sylvain Tesson and Yann Moix settled into this corner. In his new book, Houellebecq apologizes “sincerely” for giving the impression that all Muslims are “thieves”.

A German lover introduced him to the Youporn platform

Ruitenbeek or the cockroach denies political motives. As he explains in interviews, he wants to substantiate the postmodern proposition that a writer like Houellebecq “can no longer distinguish between himself and his literature”.

The question remains why he played at all. “I’m not an exhibitionist,” he writes, denying himself in Houellebecq’s way: five pages earlier, he explained his ultimate sex fantasy with two women devoted to his manhood; and he also attributes his penchant for sex movies to meeting a young German lover named M., who took him to amateur platforms like Youporn.

In that respect it also confirms Ruitenbeek’s approach of mixing fiction and reality. Only, Houellebecq explains, unlike Kirac, he had no media or even commercial ulterior motives. “I’ve always wanted to make porn videos with my wife, but only for private purposes,” he writes to 33-year-old Lysis Li, whom he has been married to since 2018.

Partial success in court for the author of the scandal

Now the author of novels like “Submission” and most recently “Annihilation” explains how he got to know the feeling of shame and regrets thinking for the first time that commercial sex has “something dirty”. So he takes comfort in his favorite author, Baudelaire (1821-1867). “They say you should dump the most horrible things in the fountain of oblivion or in the cemeteries,” he quotes him.

But then a friend pulled him out of his post-pornography depression: Gérard Depardieu, the French film monument, currently accused of sexual assault by 13 women, gave him advice: “Never give up, fight to the limit of your strength.” With this, Michel concludes his book, even though he admits defeatist that he sees only “weak chances” in his appointment process in Amsterdam.

The printer’s ink had not yet dried when the verdict was handed down – and Houellebecq was partly right. The Amsterdam judges refused to ban the film at the request of the French. But they do not rule out the risk of reputational damage. Houellebecq will have the right to view the video and request the removal of individual sequences. If Ruitenbeek does not respond, Houellebecq may complain again. ‘Gérard’, as he calls Depardieu, is right: the battle is never over.