Reykjavík Grapevine - 13.06.2003, Blaðsíða 22

Reykjavík Grapevine - 13.06.2003, Blaðsíða 22
 - the reykjavik grapevine -22 may 15 - may 29, 2003 FUNNY MONEY Icelanders are stubborn, independent and extremely proud of their history, witch is fine. Iceland’s currency reflects these things being both colorful, and full of history. The bills have pictures of historically famous or important people, while the coins have cravings of various types of fish (reflecting Iceland’s biggest industry). Still, you probably haven’t got a clue who these people are, or what type of fish it is on your króna coins, and if you simply don’t care, don’t read any further than this. The 500kr bill is the smallest of the bills, and therefore worth the least. It equals c.a. 7$ or 6eouros. On the front, and the back is: Jón Sigurðsson Forseti(president) (1811-1879) Iceland’s pride, it’s sword and it’s shield. An independence hero Jón Sigurðsson is Iceland’s answer to George Washington. Though he never became president, although nicknamed one, and did not live to see his country become independent. the part he played in securing Iceland’s independence was so big that his birthday, 17th June, became Iceland’s National day when it gained it’s independence in 1944. He was the guy who started asking politely for independence, and guess what, it worked! So! What’s it worth? 500 kr can’t really buy you much, unless you got more than one. A pack of cigarettes is 500kr, at a cheap pub you could even buy a beer. A little snack, a packet of cigarettes a cheapish beer or a hamburger will all leave you little change from a 500kr note 1króna is Iceland’s tiniest bit of money. Now that’s a cod isn’t it? It’s there because it’s probably the most important for Iceland’s economy. On the other side you will find troll, a big guy that tends to change into a rock if hit by sunlight, some Icelander’s look like that, but sunlight won’t stop them if you mess with them. A troll, alongside with a dragon, a bull and an eagle are believed to protect Iceland from hostile foreigners and together they form Iceland’s coat of arms. B O O K S PLATFORM BY MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ Anyone reading Michel Houellebecq’s Platform prior to September 11, 2001, might be forgiven for thinking the author is a little too hard on the world. He takes aim, in one way or another, at fathers, work, sex, Toyota Land Cruisers, financial advisers and Islam – and that’s just by page 25. But today his disconcertingly simple prose reads like an assessment of the age made from deep inside the fluttering zeitgeist itself. As with most examinations up close and anatomical, the pictures that result are a long, long way from pretty. For all their charms the French can be brooding and bitter like no other people on earth, and capable of finding reasons to complain about even the finest April day in Paris. That might not make them the cuddliest of creatures, but it has done wonders for their literature. It has enabled Michel Houellebecq, for example, to confront head on issues from which even post-Taliban, post-Saddam America tends to shy away. The author, also a poet, already established himself as the enfant terrible of the contemporary French literary scene by the time Platform took France by storm in 2000, especially with the success of The Elementary Particles, which described in unsparing detail the phenomenon of exchangist sex clubs. But it is the baleful Platform that proves the author a worthy heir to Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary showed the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie with such precision it prompted many to seek to ban it. In the same vein, Platform serves as an eloquent and spectacularly bilous soapbox that would only be truly shocking if it did not cause popular outrage. If Houellebecq’s fictional account of a middle-aged government bureaucrat who quits his job to spearhead a corporate-financed international sex tourism venture is indeed literature as ammunition, it must be said that he targets everything and everyone, including himself. The artistry of his endeavor is that the attacks are executed as casually as they are unsparingly, and undertaken less deliberately than by default. Why hardly needs explaining in the post-September 11 world: virtually any accurate, objective description of the state of fin-de-millennium society would have to include accounts of widespread disaffection with consumer society, the social disaster of mass tourism, the excesses of marketing and the growth and glamorization of terrorism, and the scarcity of romance, or even emotion, in modern daily life. As our erstwhile allies would say, c’est la vie. And the life of blasé civil servant Michel that we see is twice bookmarked by death, beginning with the brutal murder of his father and ending with a massive terrorist attack mounted by Islamist extremists at a resort in Thailand – an episode eerily prescient of the Bali nightclub bombing. He is wounded and his girlfriend, Valerie, is killed while they’re having lunch. In between these incidents we are treated to scenes from the life of a modern Frenchman who is “perfectly adapted to the information age, that is to say good for nothing” and of a modern France that the French tourist office must go to terrific lengths to conceal: a country of rapes on Paris commuter trains that go unpunished, thoroughly dead end jobs (when there are jobs) and consumerism with pre-packaged experiences standing in for that famous joie de vivre at every turn. This is the same France where synagogues are routinely torched and vandalized, drawing vague condemnation from government officials but little in the way of preventive or punitive action, and where no major recent anti-war demonstration was without its contingent of flagrantly anti-Semitic hoodlums. Houellebecq doesn’t condemn religion outright, though he does come quite close. Although his castigation of Islam takes place through the lens of someone contemplating the difficulties of making sexual tourism work in the Muslim world, he primarily has Muslims themselves lambast their religion. An Egyptian acquaintance of the narrator renounces his Islamic heritage with the following: “Do you know what I call Muslims? The losers of the Sahara…Islam could only have been born in a stupid desert, among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do – pardon me – than bugger their camels. The closer a religion comes to monotheism –consider this carefully, cher monsieur – the more cruel and inhuman it becomes; and of all religions, Islam imposes the most radical monotheism. From its beginnings, it has been characterized by an uninterrupted series of wars of invasion and massacres; never, for as long as it exists, will peace reign in the world.” Even if France were not a country with five million Muslims, those could easily be construed as fighting words. Naturally, passages like this led to incriminations, lawsuits and death threats – Houellebecq has a bodyguard when he comes to Paris and now calls Ireland home. But particular venom is reserved for the West. He never makes the fatal misstep of suggesting Western society is to blame for terrorism, but the faultlines he detects in Occidental confidence run uncomfortably deep. Michel says he doesn’t hate the West, but rather has a “great contempt” for it, because he “knows that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what’s more, we continue to export it.” In his view, sexual tourism is a valid means of redressing the imbalance between rich and poor countries. As he explains: “…you have several hundred million Westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction: they spend their lives looking, but they don’t find it and are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality. It’s simple, really simple to understand: it’s an ideal trading opportunity. The money you could make is almost unimaginable…” This cynical assessment, formulated in the Thai massage parlors Michel frequents, leads to the launch of a sort of Club Med-for-sex initiative that ultimately takes Michel and Valerie back to Thailand as a couple (they meet their for the first time on a package tour). Perhaps because Platform was published before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the biggest media controversy centered on the frank descriptions, if not to say spirited defense, of sex tourism. It almost goes without saying, this being a modern French book, that sex crops up almost everywhere. It is generally heterosexual sex (between consenting adults; the author doesn’t delve into child prostitution), and described so matter-of-factly that it feels like forced titillation. Far more amusing are the endless and easeful skewerings of everyone and everything from contemporary art to corporate honchos, self-loathing travel guides to John Grisham novels and, of course, the media. But those are the easy targets. It is the scene of the Thailand terrorist attack, described with brutal and chilling simplicity, that underpins the book, which beneath all the controversies is a lamentation for the times. For all the religion and education in the world, indeed for all the evolution of the human species, is bullets over a club sandwich what it has come down to? Michel never asks that question, but then he already knows the answer. Unfortunately, he is not alone. Anthony Grant An Egyptian acquaintance said Islam could only have been born in a stupid desert, among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do than bugger their camels.

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