Free The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, Gavin Bowd

their apartments, others in the hospital or in retirement homes, but all had essentially died because of a lack of care. In the weeks that followed, that same newspaper published a series of atrocious reports, illustrated with photos that were reminiscent of concentration camps, relating the agony of old people crammed into communal rooms, naked on their beds, in diapers, moaning all day without anyone coming to rehydrate them or even to give them a glass of water; describing the rounds made by nurses unable to contact the families who were on vacation, regularly gathering up the corpses to make space for new arrivals. “Scenes unworthy of a modern country,” wrote the journalist, without realizing that they were in fact the proof that France was
becoming
a modern country, that only an authentically modern country was capable of treating old people purely as rubbish, and that such contempt for one’s ancestors would have been inconceivable in Africa, or in a traditional Asian country.
    The obligatory indignation aroused by these images quickly faded, and the development of active euthanasia—or, increasingly often, active voluntary euthanasia—would, in the course of the following decades, solve the problem.
     
     
    It was recommended to humans, wherever possible, that they end up with a
complete
life story, before they died, in accordance with the belief, widespread at the time, that the last moments of life might be accompanied by some kind of
revelation.
The example cited most often was that of Marcel Proust, whose first reflex upon sensing death’s approach was to rush to the manuscript of
Remembrance of Things Past
in order to note his impressions of dying.
     
     
    Very few, in practice, had this courage.

 
     
    Daniel1, 8
     
All in all, Barnaby, we would need a powerful ship, with a thrust of three hundred kilotons. Then we could escape the Earth’s gravity and make for the satellites of Jupiter.
    —Captain Clark
     
    PREPARATION, FILMING, post-production, a limited promotional tour (
Two Flies Later
had been released simultaneously in most of the European capitals, but I restricted myself to France and Germany): in all, I had stayed away from home for just over a year. The first surprise awaited me at the Almería airport: a compact group of around fifty people, massed behind the barriers at the exit, were brandishing diaries, T-shirts, and posters of the film. I already knew this much from the early viewing figures: the movie, which had modest takings in Paris, had been a hit in Madrid—as well as, I might add, in London, Rome, and Berlin; I had become a star in Europe.
    Once the group had dispersed, I noticed Isabelle, on a seat at the back of the arrivals hall. That too was a shock. Dressed in trousers and a shapeless T-shirt, she screwed up her eyes in my direction with a mixture of fear and shame. When I was a few meters away from her she began to cry, the tears streamed down her cheeks without her trying to wipe them away. She had put on at least twenty kilos. Even her face, this time, had not been spared: puffy and blotchy, her hair greasy and unkempt, she looked awful.
    Obviously Fox was overjoyed, jumped in the air, licked my face for a good quarter of an hour; I sensed easily that that was not going to be enough. She refused to undress in my presence, and reappeared dressed in a flannelette tracksuit that she wore to bed. In the taxi from the airport, we did not exchange a word. Empty bottles of Cointreau were scattered on the bedroom floor; that said, the house had been tidied.
    In the course of my career, I had blathered enough about the opposition between eroticism and tenderness, and I had played the roles of all the characters: the girl who goes to gang bangs and yet seeks a very chaste, refined, and sisterly relationship with the true love of her life; the half-impotent simpleton who accepts her; the gangbanger who takes advantage. Consummation, forgetting, misery. I had made entire