Two years ago, John Updike reviewed Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island in the New Yorker. Whereas most of Houellebecq’s novels are about men who simply can’t relate to women and instead just use them for lots of impersonal, demeaning sex, The Possibility of an Island is different: it’s a sci-fi novel about a clone of a man who simply can’t relate to women and instead just uses them for lots of impersonal, demeaning sex.

Updike had this to say:

Houellebecq’s solemnly blunt descriptions of sex acts are notorious, or as notorious as such things can be in a sex-saturated age; but it is one thing to propagandize for sex and another to integrate it, as more than “naughty bits,” into the conflict-ridden flow of incident and psychology that make up a novel. The reader has no trouble believing that Daniel1, over forty and physically no prize, sorely grieves when his pet slut Esther in her heedless youth tires of him; it is another thing for the reader to grieve along with him. This reader, actually, rejoiced when the breakup came, and wondered why Esther had been so slow about it.

Now, I like Houellebecq’s fiction, honestly. I think it’s interesting. Possibility of an Island isn’t my favorite of his—I prefer Platform. But the Literary Saloon brings news that Houellebecq has directed his own film version of Possibility of an Island, and while it does sound bad…

Most of the movie appears to have been filmed in a quarry (actually on location in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands). The costumes, characters and gadgets resemble those from a science fiction B movie from the 1950s or an early black and white episode of Doctor Who. The desultory action takes place against a sound-track mostly taken from Ravel’s “Bolero”.

…it also sounds as though I’m going to have to go see it the minute it comes out over here.