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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Strong rec: if you've ever wondered about H. P. Lovecraft but lacked the time to read your way through his writings (and all six volumes of his letters), this is Houellebecq giving you the Cliff's Notes version. (Lovecraft is considered a major literary figure in France, hence the interest among academics.)

(Disclaimer: I might have written the odd piece of Lovecraft-influenced fiction in the past ...)

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Absolutely agree. Haven't read the english translation, but the original version was one of my favourite read last year. It is a short book (about 150pages I believe) and very skillfully written. It is very clinical, but in the same way Lovecraft is clinical in his descriptions of the the unnameable. It ends up giving a chilly insight on a deeply tormented man, who had trouble adjusting to modern society in all its horror and prurience!

>(Lovecraft is considered a major literary figure in France, hence the interest among academics.)

Lovecraft is not really considered "a major literary figure in France" and Houellebecq is not an academic (except in the sense that he studied at a university like half of French, but he's not working in academia or anything like that).

Perhaps you meant Houellebecq? He indeed is considered a "major literary figure" (if somewhat controversial).

"somewhat controversial"? That's a little bit of an understatement. Most of his books have created long and reverberating flamewars all over Europe.

From Zola to Celine, Cocteau, Queneau, Bataille, Duras and onwards to Houellebecq (and others), the French relish and celebrate controversiality.

If a French literary author is not controversial, they have failed.

It's nothing much, and nothing like the "career stopper" that this can be in the anglo-saxon world -- they'll still get top honors at the Académie française (the very core of the establishment) eventually.

I'm not sure if you are counting Houellebecq among academics, but he has a agricultural engineering degree and worked in IT for more than a decade before becoming a full-time writer.

This is one reasons why I love his books (esp. the first ones), I think you can tell he has a scientific mind from his writing.

There's a chapter in an early book where the IT consultant protagonist is leafing through a technical report from some government bureaucracy full with buzz-speak about how they require "flexible system architectures" and "object oriented databases" or something or the other. The consultant finds it amusing and says something along the lines of "as long as they're paying me". Reminded me a little of Brett Easton Ellis, there's a similar kind of cynicism and detachment, with regards to white collar work.

There's also Graham Harman's take on Lovecraft as the patron saint of his object-oriented ontology, in Weird Realism.

Laundry files?

Yup.

Odd coincidence that I literally just finished reading The Atrocity Archives about ten minutes ago. Great book, loved it. Thought the series might have been the inspiration for the movie Cabin in the Woods, but seems not.

I thought he was referring to "A Colder War," which to me replicates perfectly the cold dread I felt when reading Lovecraft's stories about the Colour out of Space, Irem of the Pillars, et al---more so than any of the works by Lovecraft's other fans (including Derleth, whose work I didn't enjoy).

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