Unreconciled Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Michel Houellebecq

  Title Page

  Disclaimer

  English

  French

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION

  This selection of poems chosen from four collections shines a fresh light on Michel Houellebecq and emphasises the radical singularity of his work. Drawing on similar themes to those of his novels, Unreconciled is a journey into the depths of individual experience and universal passions.

  Divided into five parts, Unreconciled forms a narrative of love, hopelessness, catastrophe and, ultimately, redemption. In a world of supermarkets and public transport, Houellebecq manages to find traces of divine grace even as he exposes our inexorable decline into chaos.

  Told through forms and rhythms that are both ancient and new, with language steeped in the everyday, Houellebecq’s vision of our era is one brimming with tensions that cannot – and will not – be reconciled.

  About the Author

  Michel Houellebecq is a poet, essayist and novelist.

  Also by Michel Houellebecq

  Fiction

  Whatever

  Atomised

  Platform

  Lanzarote

  The Possibility of an Island

  The Map and the Territory

  Submission

  Non-fiction

  H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

  Public Enemies (with Bernard-Henri Lévy)

  Poetry

  La Pursuite du bonheur

  Le Sens du combat (The Art of Struggle)

  Renaissance

  Poésies

  Configuration du dernier rivage

  In this dual-language edition, you can tap a poem’s title – or in the case of untitled poems, the first line – to switch languages.

  Contents

  First I stumbled into a freezer

  HYPERMARKET – NOVEMBER

  AFTERNOON ON THE BOULEVARD PASTEUR

  UNEMPLOYMENT

  ‘The sun rises and grows’

  DISTRIBUTION – CONSUMPTION

  LOVE, LOVE.

  MIDDAY

  ‘Like a weekend on a bus’

  JIM

  ‘I love hospitals, asylums of suffering’

  ‘So many hearts have beaten’

  ‘Death is difficult for old ladies who are too rich’

  ‘My dad was a solitary and barbarous cunt’

  POSSIBLE JOURNEY’S END

  EVENING’S END

  ‘My right earlobe is swollen’

  ‘At the corner of the FNAC seethed’

  ‘You would have to pass through a lyrical universe’

  ‘Afternoon of false joy’

  ‘The little washed objects’

  ‘This evening, while walking in Venice’

  ‘Tres Calle de Sant’Engracia’

  A COLD SENSATION

  ‘Why can we never’

  DIFFERENTIATION IN THE RUE D’AVRON

  To live without a fulcrum, surrounded by the void

  ‘To live without a fulcrum, surrounded by the void’

  ‘The light gleamed on the waters’

  ‘Gentle rolling of the hills’

  ‘On the direct train to Dourdan’

  ‘In the almost empty metro’

  ‘The breathing of washers’

  ‘My body belongs’

  ‘Television aerials’

  ‘The exercise of reflection’

  ‘Mist surrounded the mountain’

  ‘I floated above the river’

  ‘A moment of pure innocence’

  ‘The bodies piled up on the sand’

  ‘Skin is a borderline object’

  ‘It is time to pause’

  READ THE BELGIAN PRESS!

  REACHING CREUSE

  THE CLOUDS, THE NIGHT

  ‘Ghosts displayed their harmful hands’

  ‘A vegetation of abolition’

  ‘I had gone on holiday with my son’

  ‘We must develop an attitude of non-resistance to the world’

  ‘Insects run between the stones’

  ‘Before, there was love’

  IN THE CLEAR AIR

  ‘Swallows fly off’

  ABSENCES OF LIMITED DURATION

  ‘To exist, to perceive’

  FAR FROM HAPPINESS

  ‘The universe is in the shape of a semi-circle’

  ‘By the death of the purest’

  ‘Gone the belief’

  ‘I have no more within’

  SO LONG

  LAST TIMES

  A steel triangle severs the landscape

  VARIATION 49: THE FINAL JOURNEY

  ‘The first time I made love was on a beach’

  17–23

  ‘My former obsession and my new fervour’

  ‘In the morning’

  DJERBA ‘THE SWEET’

  HOLIDAY-CLUB

  HOLIDAY-CLUB 2

  HOLIDAYS

  ‘The light evolves almost in the forms’

  ‘No shadow replies’

  ‘This desire to no longer do anything and especially to no longer feel anything’

  ‘A rapid sunny morning’

  ‘The abolished arc of slender sadness’

  ‘The central exhaustion of a starless night’

  THE MEMORY OF THE SEA

  ‘She lived in a bijou cottage’

  ‘So calm, in her coma’

  HMT

  I am in a tunnel made of compact rocks

  RELIGIOUS VOCATION

  ‘I have always had the impression that we were close’

  NEW ORDER

  ‘When it is cold’

  ‘Traces of the night’

  ‘Like a maize seedling dug up from its soil’

  ‘I am like a child who no longer has the right to tears’

  ‘Outside there is the night’

  ‘Gently, we moved towards a fictional palace’

  ‘The fine and delicate texture of the clouds’

  ‘The news mixes up like needles’

  ‘I went round and round in my bedroom’

  ‘A station in the Yvelines’

  ‘When the meaning of things disappears’

  ‘Before, long before, there were beings’

  ‘Homages to humanity’

  THE DISAPPEARANCE

  ‘We travel protected in the uniform light’

  ‘It is like a vein running beneath the skin’

  ‘It is true that this world, where we have difficulty breathing’

  THE WILL TO FIGHT

  Immobile grace

  ‘Immobile grace’

  ‘The itemised lump’

  THE IMMATERIALS

  THE CORE OF THE MALAISE

  ‘Sublime abstraction of the landscape’

  ‘The TGV Atlantique slipped through the night’

  ‘The weather was nice’

  WEDNESDAY. MAYENCE – RHINE VALLEY – KOBLENZ

  ‘I am difficult to find’

  NICE

  MODERN ART

  THE GARDEN OF FERNS

  THE GIRL

  VÉRONIQUE

  ‘A field of constant intensity’

  A SUMMER IN DEUIL-LA-BARRE

  GREY HOUSE

  TWILIGHT

  EVENING WITHOUT MIST

  ‘When torrential rain fell’

  ‘Dawn grows in the softness’

  ‘There is a country’

  THE CONTRACTING OPERATORS

  THE LONG ROAD TO CLIFDEN

  ‘The enamoured master in a fictional challenge’

  PASSAGE

&n
bsp; ‘Show yourself, my friend, my double’

  ‘The colours of madness’

  ‘The beetroot fields conquered by pylons’

  ‘We had taken the fast lane’

  ‘We were waiting, serene, alone on the white runway’

  ‘In the mindlessness that takes the place of grace’

  First I stumbled into a freezer

  HYPERMARKET – NOVEMBER

  First I stumbled into a freezer,

  I began to cry and felt a bit scared

  Someone grumbled I spoiled the atmosphere,

  To look normal I resumed my advance.

  Well-dressed suburbanites with brutal eyes

  Passed slowly near the bottled water;

  A murmur of disorder, of semi-debauchery,

  Rose from the shelves. My steps were clumsy.

  I collapsed at the cheese counter;

  Two old ladies were carrying sardines.

  The first turned to tell her neighbour:

  ‘It’s sad, all the same, for a boy that age.’

  Then I saw some very wide and wary feet;

  A sales assistant was taking measurements.

  Many seemed surprised by my new shoes;

  For the last time I felt slightly cut off.

  AFTERNOON ON THE BOULEVARD PASTEUR

  I can still see the blue eyes of German tourists

  Discussing society over their beers.

  Their thoughtful ‘Ach so’s, slightly nervous perhaps,

  Crossed the fresh air; they filled several tables.

  A few chemistry friends chatted on my left:

  New perspectives in organic synthesis!

  Chemistry makes you happy, poetry makes you sad,

  We would have to arrive at a single science.

  Molecular structure, philosophy of the self

  And the absurd fate of the last architects;

  Society rots, decomposes into sects;

  Let’s sing hallelujah for the return of the king!

  UNEMPLOYMENT

  Crossing a city offering nothing any more

  Amongst human beings endlessly renewed

  I know it by heart, this overground metro;

  Days pass by without me saying a word.

  Oh! these afternoons, coming home from unemployment

  Thinking again of the rent, morose meditation

  We may not live, but we get old all the same

  And nothing changes nothing, neither summer, nor things.

  After a few months you run out of benefits

  And autumn returns, slow as gangrene;

  Money becomes the only thought, the only law,

  You’re truly alone. And you drag on, and you drag on …

  Others continue their existential dance,

  You’re protected by a transparent wall,

  Winter has returned; their life seems real.

  Maybe, somewhere, the future awaits you.

  The sun rises and grows, falls back on the city,

  We have passed through the night without deliverance

  I hear the buses and the subtle murmur

  Of social exchanges. I reach presence.

  Today will take place. The invisible surface

  Marking the air with our suffering beings

  Forms and hardens at a terrible speed;

  The body, the body however, grants belonging.

  We have passed through weariness and desires

  Without finding the taste of childhood dreams,

  There is nothing left behind our smiles,

  We are prisoners of our transparency.

  DISTRIBUTION – CONSUMPTION

  I. I could hear stumps rubbing,

  The amputated man next door

  The concierge had allies

  Who cleaned after the rain

  The blood of disembowelled neighbours,

  It had to come to pass

  Discussions about truth,

  Words of love leaving traces.

  The woman next door left the building,

  The cook arrived;

  I should have bought some furniture,

  All this could have been avoided.

  Since everything had to happen

  Jean has burst the eyes of the cat

  Isolated monads drifting,

  Distribution and entrechats.

  II. Amidst microwave ovens,

  The fate of consumers

  Is decided every second;

  There is no room for error.

  On my list for tomorrow,

  I’d put: ‘Washing up liquid’;

  Yet I’m a human being:

  Bin-bag promotion!

  At any moment my life changes

  In the Continent hypermarket

  I rush forward then retreat,

  Seduced by packagings.

  The butcher had a moustache

  And a carnivorous smile,

  His face was covered in spots …

  I threw myself at his feet!

  III. I came across an alley cat,

  Its eyes paralysed me

  The cat lay in the dust,

  Legions of insects crawled from it.

  Your young sea-lion knee

  Sheathed in a fishnet stocking

  Bent without the slightest sound;

  In the night, the absent burn bright.

  I met an old proletariat,

  Who sought his missing son

  In the Tour GAN, at the cemetery

  Of disappointed revolutionaries.

  Your eyes swivelled between the tables

  Like the turret of a tank;

  Perhaps you were desirable,

  But I was completely fed up.

  LOVE, LOVE.

  In a porn cinema, wheezing pensioners

  Contemplated, incredulous,

  The badly filmed frolics of lusty couples;

  There was no story line.

  And that, I thought, is the face of love,

  The genuine face;

  Some are seductive; they always seduce,

  And others struggle on.

  There is neither destiny nor fidelity,

  Just bodies that attract;

  With no attachment and especially no pity,

  We play and tear apart.

  Some are seductive and therefore much loved;

  They will know orgasms.

  But so many others are weary, with nothing to hide,

  Not even phantasms;

  Just a solitude aggravated by the immodest

  Joy of women;

  Just a certainty: ‘That’s not for me’,

  An obscure little drama.

  They will certainly die slightly disappointed,

  Without lyrical illusions;

  They will practise fully the art of self-hate,

  It will be mechanical.

  I address all those who have never been loved,

  Who have never pleased;

  I address those absent from liberated sex,

  From ordinary pleasure.

  Fear nothing, my friends, your loss is slim:

  Nowhere does love exist;

  It’s just a cruel game where you are the victims,

  A game for specialists.

  MIDDAY

  The Rue Surcouf stretches out, wet with rain;

  In the distance, a delicatessen.

  An American in love

  Writes to her sweetheart.

  Life passes in little drops;

  Humans under their umbrellas

  Seek a way out

  Between panic and boredom

  (Cigarettes crushed in the mud).

  Existence at low altitude,

  Slow movements of a bulldozer;

  I have lived a brief interlude

  In the suddenly empty café.

  Like a weekend on a bus,

  Like a tumour in the uterus,

  The sequence of events

  Always follows a plan.

  Yet, the damp towels,
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br />   Beside the insipid pools

  Destroy complaisance

  The brain goes into action

  It sees the consequences

  Of certain holiday romances,

  It would like to detach itself

  From the stained cranium.

  You can clean your kitchen,

  Sleep on Mepronizine,

  Night is never dark enough

  To put an end to it all.

  JIM

  For as long as you’re not there, I wait, I hope for you;

  It’s a white journey, without oxygen.

  The lost passers-by are strangely green;

  At the back of the bus I feel my veins burst.

  An old friend points me towards the Ségur stop.

  He’s a great boy, he knows my problems;

  I get off I see Jim, he gets out of the car,

  He wears on his jacket an unknown emblem.

  Sometimes Jim is cruel, he waits for me to feel pain;

  I bleed effortlessly; the car radio hums,

  Then Jim takes out his tools; there’s no one left,

  The boulevard is deserted. No need for a hospital.

  I love hospitals, asylums of suffering

  Where the forgotten old turn into organs

  Beneath the mocking and utterly indifferent eyes

  Of interns who scratch themselves, eating bananas.

  In their hygienic yet sordid bedrooms

  You see clearly the nothingness awaiting them

  Especially in the morning when they rise, pale,

  And moan for their first cigarette.

  The old know how to cry with minimum noise,

  They forget their thoughts and forget their gestures

  They no longer laugh much, and all they have left

  After a few months, before the final phase,

  Are a few words, almost always the same:

  Thanks but I’m not hungry, my son will come on Sunday,

  I smell of my intestines, my son will come all the same.

  And the son is not there, and their hands almost white.

  So many hearts have beaten, already, on this Earth

  And the little objects tucked in their wardrobes

  Tell the sinister and lamentable story

  Of those who have never known love on this Earth.

  The modest crockery of old bachelors

  The nicked cutlery of the war widow

  My God! And the handkerchiefs of old spinsters

  The insides of wardrobes, how cruel life is!