Before Paris Shooting, Authors Tapped Into Mood of a France 'Homesick at Home' - NYTime... - 0 views
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Though Mr. Zemmour’s is a work of reactionary nostalgia and Mr. Houellebecq’s a futuristic fantasy, both books have hit the dominant note in the national mood today: “inquiétude,” or profound anxiety about the future.
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broadly, concern has grown that the political center is eroding and that extremes are rising in a way reminiscent of the 1930s, along with a sense that France, which prides itself on its republican tradition and strong, centralized state, has ceded too much power to the European Union.
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“Houellebecq uses his talent, if I may say so, to exalt or to highlight this aspect of a collective fear that is descending upon us,” the philosopher Malek Chebel, who is Muslim, said on France 2 television this week. “I reproach him for it, all the more so that he is a great writer, and when you are a great writer, you have more responsibilities.”
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“I think this anxiety is the idea of seeing France give up on itself, of changing to the point of no longer being recognizable,” said the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, whose much-debated 2013 book, “L’identité Malheureuse,” or “The Unhappy Identity,” discussed the problems immigration poses for French identity and cultural integration. “People are homesick at home,
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Mr. Houellebecq rejected the idea that literature could alter events.“I don’t have other examples of a novel changing the course of history,” Mr. Houellebecq said on the same program. “Other things change the course of history. Essays, ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ things like that, but not novels. That has never happened.”Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
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Mr. Houellebecq called the novel “a political fiction,” in the same vein as those of Joseph Conrad or John Buchan.
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Commentators said that both “The French Suicide” and “Submission” would ultimately shore up the political fortunes of the National Front, a growing if incoherent mix of anti-establishment nativism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-NATO and anti-European Union fervor.
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“The left has nothing to propose or to respond, and Zemmour and Houellebecq profit from this absence,” said Eric Naulleau, Mr. Zemmour’s more left-leaning co-host on a weekly television program and the author of a 2005 essay critical of Mr. Houellebecq.“One flees to the past and the other flees to the future,” Mr. Naulleau added of the two authors, “but neither offers any answers.”