The paperback of Michel Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991 in French) can be had for a few pounds/dollars in its 2000s Gollancz English edition, the 100-page essay being here heavily padded by the publisher to 256 pages with a couple of stories and a friendly fannish-looking cover added.
But the original 150-page English-translation hardback seems well out-of-print and has ascended to Collector-land…
Now, newly-listed for pre-order is a new 150-page hardback edition from Cernunnos, set for 3rd September 2019 and with a new cover. When the paperback is still widely available and cheap, why a reprint? My guess is they’re catering for continuing demand from university libraries, who want stout hardbacks on their shelves.
For those unfamiliar with the glittering catacombs of French intellectualism, I should note that Houellebecq can’t be thought of as a political philosopher or even a straight critic in the refined French style. He’s more what one what might call a gloomily poetic and provocative observer of his depressive times, and presumably in France he goes down well among those infected with their curious strain of gloomily nihilistic and largely gestural intellectualism. That said, the Lovecraft book was his first, and his breakthrough. It was written at the behest of the editor of Nouvelle Revue de Paris, to be one of the editor’s series of books for the high-end publisher Le Rocher. Thus Houellebecq had something to prove to a stern French literary establishment, the most perceptive of whose members knew a thing or three about Lovecraft by the late 1980s. I’ve read Against the World, Against Life in the unofficial Mackay translation. Houellebecq gets the broad biographical detail right, and weaves it with the fiction in an entertaining manner, and as such an undergraduate would definitely benefit from the essay as a short introduction which makes a dozen or more stimulating debating points. One can see why universities might deem the book suitable for degree courses.
But, despite this presumed need for rigour in writing a first ‘breakthrough’ book circa 1989/90, there appears to have also been a certain level of speed involved. In the text Houellebecq admits in passing that he doesn’t have access to the Letters, and seems to be working from memory in places. The Miskatonic Debating Club & Literary Society review usefully checks the book’s endnotes and finds them lacking…
… for all his assertions that he was forced by the constraints of the essay format to check his facts and cite his sources, he actually doesn’t. Most of what he says is supported by citations but some of it isn’t. Reading his Notes in the back of the book, the translator Dorna Khazeni lists many instances where throwaway references within the text attributed to HPL or others cannot be located, even after cross-checking with S.T. Joshi, who seems to have all of Lovecraft at his fingertips.
Update: the reprint just keeps getting pushed back and back, and at Jan 2020 is now well into 2020. I assume the expected library orders have not been flooding in…