The Possibility of an Island读书介绍
| 类别 | 页数 | 译者 | 网友评分 | 年代 | 出版社 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 书籍 | 432页 | 2020 | Phoenix |
| 定价 | 出版日期 | 最近访问 | 访问指数 |
|---|---|---|---|
| GBP 8.99 | 2020-02-20 … | 2021-10-27 … | 8 |
Who, among you, deserves eternal life?
Daniel is a highly successful stand-up comedian who has made a career out of playing outrageously on the prejudices of his public. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, he has begun to detest laughter in particular and mankind in general. Despite this, Daniel is unable to stop himself believing in the possibility of love.
A thousand years on, war, drought and earthquakes have decimated the earth and Daniel24 lives alone in a secure compound - his only companion, a cloned dog named Fox. Outside, the remnants of the human race roam in packs, while Daniel24 attempts to decipher his predecessor's history. In a nightmarish vision of the implosion of the modern world, he, like his predecessor attempts to fathom the meaning of love, sex, suffering and regret.
'His deftly constructed novel is a bleak comment on contemporary society, at times funny, brutal and revolting.'
THE ECONOMIST
Text extract from
The Possibility of an Island
Michel Houellebecq
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 situation similar to that of domestic animals. Undoubtedly there used to be a form of domotic 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 tasks and 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 master's return.
2711, 325104, 13375317, 452626. At the address indicated I was shown an image of her pussy jerky, pixellated, 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 mysteries as though it were a tunnel opening on to 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 civilisations,
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 grey plastic covered the plain; we were north of Almeria. The harvesting of the fruit and vegetables that grew beneath the plastic used to be done by agricultural labourers most often of Moroccan origin. After mechanisation was introduced, the workers evaporated into the surrounding sierras.
In addition to the usual equipment electric generator powering the protective fence, satellite network, sensors the 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 maps its 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 yoghurt 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 cu**
With my
Cu**
245535, 43, 3. When I say 'I', I am lying. Let us posit the 'I' of perception neutral and limpid. Put it next to the 'I' of intermediation when 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 done in this way, in silence.
Contrary to received ideas, Words don't 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.
PART ONE COMMENTARY OF DANIEL24
DANIEL1, 1
Now, what does a rat do when it's 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 Turkey it was, incidentally, the last time I was to go on holiday with my parents. My silly bitch of a sister she was thirteen at the time was just beginning to turn the guys on. It was at breakfast; as usual in the morning, a queue had formed in front of the scrambled eggs, something the holiday- makers seemed incredibly fond of. Next to me, an old English woman (desiccated, nasty, the kind who would cut up foxes to decorate her living room), who had already helped herself copiously to eggs, didn't hesitate to snaffle up the last three sausages on the hotplate. 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 queue behind her became rigid; his fork, already reaching for a sausage, stopped in mid-air, and his face turned red with indignation. He was an enormous German, a colossus, more than two metres tall and weighing at least 150 kilos. I thought for a moment that he was going to plant his fork in the o
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