Reykjavík Grapevine - 13.06.2003, Page 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.