Houellebecq pulls punches

09 September 2015 - 02:16 By Andrew Donaldson

If you read one book this week 'Sweet Caress' by William Boyd (Bloomsbury) R370An audacious, deeply satisfying layer cake of a novel about a documentary photographer, Amory Clay, whose work took in most of the upheavals of the 20th century. Structured as a memoir, the novel is a celebration of the success of women journalists like Lee Miller and Martha Gellhorn at a time when the profession was dominated by men.The issueOn the day Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel Submission (William Heinemann) was released in France, gunmen stormed the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, including the novelist's close friend economist Bernard Maris. That week, Charlie Hebdo's cover featured a cartoon of a lecherous Houellebecq with the prediction that in 2022, when the novel is set, he'd be observing Ramadan. Elsewhere, Laurent Joffrin, editor of Liberation, argued that Submission's publication marked "the date in history when the ideas of the far Right made a grand return to serious French literature".The novel, about France under sharia law, has now been translated into English, and, judging from the first reviews, is not quite the immediately scandalous satire we've been promised. "Rather than being a dark vision of a world ruled by mad mullahs," Alex Preston noted in The Observer, "it presents the moderate Muslims who take over France as a force of spiritual integrity and revolutionary verve, 'a historic opportunity for the moral and familial rearmament of Europe'; the real targets of the book are France's bloated institutions, its venal politicians, its sclerotic literary scene." Writing in The Independent, Arifa Akbar said the great surprise here "is that the novel does not aim its hate, fear and intolerance where one might expect. In the end, Submission is about the pain of being a middle-class Frenchman, nostalgia for his glorious, lost identity and self-loathing for all that has replaced it."Crash courseHollywood, they say, enjoys a healthy relationship with booze, which is the case presented by Will Francis and Stacey Marsh's entertaining and rather attractive recipe book, Cocktails of the Movies: An Illustrated Guide to Cinematic Mixology (Prestel). Marilyn Monroe's Manhattan (Some Like It Hot), Lauren Bacall's Scotch mist (The Big Sleep), The Dude's White Russian (The Big Lebowski), Mark Wahlberg's margarita (Boogie Nights), even Sam Rockwell's Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) are included in this collection of 64 well-oiled movie moments. There are several martinis, including James Bond's classic Vesper from Casino Royale. But after a few of them, you do start to say things like "Mish Moneypenny."The bottom line"Nature produced [Caligula]. to demonstrate just how far unlimited vice can go when combined with unlimited power." - Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar by Tom Holland (Little, Brown)..

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