Paris (AFP)
The advent of a "new world" after the crisis caused by the coronavirus epidemic does not convince the writer Michel Houellebecq who is betting on the contrary of a "slightly worse" world.
"I do not believe half a second in declarations of the genre + nothing will never be the same again +. On the contrary, everything will remain exactly the same", affirms the author of "The map and the territory" in a letter read Monday on France Inter.
"We will not wake up, after confinement, in a new world; it will be the same, only a little worse," insists the contemporary French writer most read abroad.
The coronavirus epidemic, believes the novelist, "should have the main result of accelerating certain mutations in progress" including, in particular, "the decrease in human contact".
"The coronavirus epidemic offers a magnificent reason for this heavy trend: a certain obsolescence which seems to hit human relationships," says Michel Houellebecq.
"It would be just as false to say that we have rediscovered the tragic, death, finitude, etc ...", continues the writer who scratched in his letter some writers confined to their second home.
While the Covid-19 epidemic has caused the death of nearly 25,000 people in France, the writer affirms that "never has death been more discreet than in recent weeks".
"The victims boil down to a unity in the statistics of daily deaths and the anxiety that spreads among the population as the total increases has something strangely abstract about it," he said.
"Another figure will have taken a lot of importance in these weeks, that of the age of the sick. Until when should they be resuscitated and treated? 70, 75, 80 years?", Wonders the novelist.
"In any case, we have never expressed with such tranquil immodesty the fact that everyone's life does not have the same value", notes the author of "Submission".
© 2020 AFP