Houellebecq’s Anéantir: 734 pages, divisive ending

Anéantir: Houellebecq’s 734-page novel divides readers

Michel Houellebecq has signed his most ambitious—and so far most controversial—novel. Anéantir was published in France on January 7, spans 734 pages, and will not reach Spanish and Catalan bookstores until late August, according to publisher Anagrama. Flammarion launched it with the usual hype: the author’s eighth novel, three years after Serotonin, promising another dissection of unspoken anxieties.

The problem—or the charm—is that it doesn’t resemble what it advertises. It is not just a geopolitical thriller, though there are attacks, spies, and an esoteric backdrop. Nor is it solely a family melodrama, despite antiestéticaturing a patriarch hospitalized in a Beaujolais care home. It isn’t merely an election campaign chronicle, even if its protagonists are two recognizable candidates.

What Anéantir tells: three stories and a background year

The novel interweaves three plots unfolding over approximately one year. The first trinc Bruno Juge, Minister of Economy and Finance, running for the 2027 presidential election as number two to Benjamin Sarfati, a television show star. Both were designated by a president nearing the end of his second term: he is not named, but it is Emmanuel Macron. Sarfati serves as a stand-in for presenter Cyril Hanouna, while Juge is inspired by minister Bruno Le Maire.

The second begins with the stroke suffered by Paul Raison’s father, a retired spy left bedridden in a town in the Beaujolais wine region. The illness forces a reunion among the children: a Catholic sister sympathetic to Marine Le Pen, an unscrupulous journalist sister-in-law, and the second vvife dedicated to caring for the sick man.

The third narrates a series of attacks: against a container ship off the coast of A Coruña, against a sperm bank in Denmark, and against a migrant boat in the waters of Ibiza and Formentera.

The France of 2027 emerging from the novel’s ballot boxes

Here comes the first surprise. The France Macron leaves behind in 2027 is, contrary to the claims of “prophets of doom,” an industrial and technological power. And all this happens, the book reads, without social unrest or strikes, in an atmosphere of surprising approval. The author himself is ironically portrayed in this passage: he was one of the pessimists whom the novel corrects.

The protagonist, Paul Raison, is around 50 years old, works as the right-hand man of Minister Juge, and fits the usual archetype: cynical, solitary, and trained at the National School of Administration (ENA), the same breeding ground from which Macron emerged. His surname says it all: he trusts everything to reason. “Was he responsible for this world?” the narrator asks. “To some extent yes, he belonged to the state apparatus, yet he did not love this world.”

There are also characters who express opinions about Jovenlandeses and women in terms that, translated into French politics, would equate to those of far-right candidate Éric Zemmour. Early readings identify this as a hallmark of the house style.

The comatose father, euthanasia, and marital love

Houellebecq, opposed to euthanasia, puts an uncomfortable reason in a character’s mouth: “The real reason for euthanasia, actually, is that we can no longer tolerate the old, we don’t even want to know they exist. That’s why we park them in specialized places, out of sight of other humans.”

Several readers place the best parts of the whole in this section. One of the most repeated interpretations summarizes Anéantir as a celebration of marital love, specifically childless marital love. Other voices highlight the underlying theme: the fragility of existence and the loneliness of contemporary man in a godless world.

The attacks that lead nowhere

Reception is far from unanimous. Hardest criticisms target the resolution of the terrorist plot: in the end it is unknown who they were or what they sought, leaving that thread unresolved. Some also consider the book long-winded at times and lacking those passages that leave readers thinking for days, present in almost every previous novel by the author.

The final stretch, starting with the protagonist’s cancer diagnosis, generates the most consensus among those who have finished the 734 pages: there the book improves. The reproach is that it improves too late. And part of the audience remains simply cold, because they expected something else from the eighth Houellebecq.

Why some readers recommend pacing Houellebecq

The author has a side effect documented by his own clientele: negativity. Those who binge-read his complete work in a few weeks describe a serious mood slump, and the circulating recommendation is to alternate him with other readings, especially during stressful seasons. Some argue these novels should not be peine when sarracena is low.

Added to this is a commercial complaint: the six-month delay between the French and Spanish editions. Part of the public considers that this delay pushes people to seek the book through other channels, and some translate their anger into consumer argument: if it takes six months to bring it here, the money stays at home.

A positive conclusion, by chance

The volume closes with an acknowledgments chapter where the author explains how useful it was to document himself with doctors and, playing with his fruta as an incurable pessimist, ends with irony: “I have just arrived, by chance, at a positive conclusion; it is time to stop.”

Houellebecq is 65 years old, lives installed in pop icon status—he even appears as a character in the latest Astérix album—and drags a legion of readers who receive each installment as an oracle of European decline. With such credentials, Anéantir should find an audience in Spain in autumn. If the disillusionment reported by early readings is confirmed in Spanish, the memory of the book will remain in the ballad of marital love and not in the thriller. Although, given this author, one should not bet firmly: the same novel that disappoints some is often the one that hooks others for years.