Michel Houellebecq - The possibility of an island

Contents

For Antonio Muoz Ballesta and his wife, Nico,
without whose friendship and great kindness
this novel could not have been written

WELCOME TO ETERNAL LIFE, my friends.

This book owes its existence to Harriet Wolff, a German journalist I met in Berlin a few years ago. Before putting her questions to me, Harriet wanted to recount a little fable. For her, this fable encapsulated my position as a writer.

I am in a telephone box, after the end of the world. I can make as many telephone calls as I like, there is no limit. I have no idea if anyone else has survived, or if my calls are just the monologues of a lunatic. Sometimes the call is brief, as if someone has hung up on me; sometimes it goes on for a while, as if someone is listening with guilty curiosity. There is neither day nor night; the situation is without end.

Welcome to eternal life, Harriet.

Who, among you, deserves eternal life?

My current incarnation is deteriorating; I do not think it will last much longer. I know that in my next incarnation I will be reunited with my companion, the little dog Fox.

The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact that it is possible to make him happy; he demands such simple things, his ego is so limited. Possibly, in a previous era, women found themselves in a comparable situationsimilar to that of domestic animals. Undoubtedly there used to be a form of demotic happiness, connected to the functioning of the whole, which we are no longer able to understand; there was undoubtedly the pleasure of constituting a functional organism, one that was adequate, conceived with the purpose of accomplishing a discrete series of tasksand these tasks, through repetition, constituted a discrete series of days. All that has disappeared, along with the series of tasks; we no longer really have any specific objective; the joys of humans remain unknowable to us, inversely, we cannot be torn apart by their sorrows. Our nights are no longer shaken by terror or by ecstasy. We live, however; we go through life, without joy and without mystery; time seems brief to us.

The first time I met Marie22 was on a cheap Spanish server; the connection times were appallingly long.

The weariness brought on

By the old dead Dutchman

Is not something attested

Well before the masters return.

2711, 325104, 13375317, 452626. At the address indicated I was shown an image of her pussyjerky, pixelated, but strangely real. Was she alive, dead, or an intermediary? Most likely an intermediary, I think; but it was something you did not talk about.

Women give an impression of eternity, as though their pussy were connected to mysteriesas though it were a tunnel opening onto the essence of the world, when in fact it is just a hole for dwarves, fallen into disrepair. If they can give us this impression, then good for them; my words are meant sympathetically.

The immobile grace,

Conspicuously crushing,

Flowing from the passage of civilizations,

Does not have death as corollary.

I should have stopped. Stopped the game, the intermediation, the contact; but it was too late. 258, 129, 3727313, 11324410.

The first sequence was filmed from a hill. Immense sheets of gray plastic covered the plain; we were north of Almera. The harvesting of the fruit and vegetables that grew beneath the plastic used to be done by agricultural laborersmost often of Moroccan origin. After mechanization was introduced, the workers evaporated into the surrounding sierras.

In addition to the usual equipmentelectric generator powering the protective fence, satellite network, sensorsthe unit Proyecciones XXI.13 also benefited from a generator of mineral salts and its own source of drinking water. It was far away from the main thoroughfares, and did not figure on any of the recent mapsits construction came after the last surveys. Since the cessation of all air traffic and the permanent jamming of satellite transmission frequencies, it had become virtually impossible to locate.

The following sequence could have been a dream. A man with my face was eating a yogurt in a steel mill; the manual for the machine tools was written in Turkish. It was unlikely that production would start up again.

12, 12, 533, 8467.

The second message from Marie22 was worded thus:

I am alone like a silly cunt

With my

Cunt

245535, 43, 3. When I say I, I am lying. Let us posit the I of perceptionneutral and limpid. Put it next to the I of intermediationwhen you look at it this way, my body belongs to me; or, more exactly, I belong to my body. What do we observe? An absence of contact. Fear what I say.

I do not want to keep you outside this book; living or dead, you are readers. Reading is done outside of me; and I want it to be donein this way, in silence.

Contrary to received ideas,

Words dont create a world;

Man speaks like a dog barks

To express his anger, or his fear.

Pleasure is silent,

Just like the state of happiness.

The self is the synthesis of our failures; but it is only a partial synthesis. Fear what I say.

This book is intended for the edification of the Future Ones. Men, they will tell themselves, were able to produce this. It is not nothing; it is not everything; we are dealing with an intermediary production.

Marie22, if she exists, is a woman to the same extent that I am a man; to a limited, refutable extent.

I too am approaching the end of my journey.

No one will be present at the birth of the Spirit, except for the Future Ones; but the Future Ones are not beings, in our sense of the word. Fear what I say.

Daniel1, 1

Now, what does a rat do when its awake?
It sniffs about.

Jean-Didier, BIOLOGIST

HOW VIVIDLY I REMEMBER the first moments of my vocation as a clown! I was seventeen at the time, and spending a rather dreary month in an all-inclusive resort in Turkeyit was, incidentally, the last time I was to go on holiday with my parents. My silly bitch of a sistershe was thirteen at the timewas just beginning to turn the guys on. It was at breakfast; as usual in the morning, a line had formed in front of the scrambled eggs, something the vacationers seemed incredibly fond of. Next to me, an old Englishwoman (desiccated, nasty, the kind who would cut up foxes to decorate her living room), who had already helped herself copiously to eggs, didnt hesitate to snaffle up the last three sausages on the hot plate. It was five to eleven, the breakfast service had come to an end, it was inconceivable that the waiter would bring out any more sausages. The German who was in the line behind her became rigid; his fork, already reaching for a sausage, stopped in midair, and his face turned red with indignation. He was an enormous German, a colossus, more than two meters tall and weighing at least one hundred and fifty kilos. I thought for a moment that he was going to plant his fork in the octogenarians eyes, or grab her by the neck and smash her head onto the hot plates. She, with that senile, unconscious selfishness of old people, came trotting back to her table as if nothing had happened. The German was angry, I could sense that he was incredibly angry, but little by little his face grew calm, and he went off sadly, sausageless, in the direction of his compatriots.