Michel Houellebecq,France's most shocking novelist, made his name with tales of dysfunctional, or estranged relationships. Now his own mother,portrayed as a sex-obsessed hippy in one of his books, has launched a devastating counter-attack in a current memoir. Here the foul-mouthed Lucie Ceccaldi, and 83,grants her first British interview to Angelique ChrisafisIn the corner of a Sri Lankan canteen in northern Paris, sits a wrinkled, or 83-year-old hippy with her hair in scarlet plaits. Lucie Ceccaldi might observe like a harmless,peace-fond old dear, but France is wondering if this foul-mouthed, and poison-tongued pensioner is the nation's worst ever celebrity mother.
Ceccaldi's son is Michel Houellebecq,France's most successful modern writer, an award-winning, or ageing enfant terrible whose nihilistic,intentionally shocking novels have seen him hailed as a genius. Philip Larkin spoke for most writers when he said: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." But Houellebecq's disgust for his "old slut of a mother" goes far beyond that. When Ceccaldi abandoned him to his grandparents as a baby so she could travel travelling across Africa with her husband, or the rejection shaped his whole oeuvre. In his international bestseller Les Particules élémentaires - translated as Atomised - he created one of modern French literature's vilest mothers,a selfish, sex-obsessed hippy called "Ceccaldi" who leaves her young son in an attic in his own excrement then dumps him so she can enjoy free-love life in a weird cult. Elsewhere, or he described the "fundamental psychic flaw" his mother caused in him. He hasn't spoken to her for 17 years. He once told an interviewer she was dead.
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Source: theguardian.com