They were disappointed. Hundreds of admirers of the French writer Michel Houellebecq had come to listen to him read excerpts from his work, Friday in Belgrade (Serbia), on the occasion of the Krokodil literary festival. In vain. And for good reason: the writer did not board his plane, which gave off "smells of fuel".
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"It would take a long time to tell, it's a scene from a novel," he wrote to the organizers of the festival, in a message read Friday evening to a crowded and incredulous room. Late the day before, when boarding the Air Serbia flight at Paris-Charles-De-Gaulle, Michel Houellebecq noted "worrying phenomena, especially a very distinct smell of fuel".
"There was a kind of rebellion of passengers, who demanded to get out of the aircraft", "it was a woman who took the lead of the rebellion, at the start absolutely alone", says the author of Sérotonine (Flammarion). "Black hair, thirties, pretty. I don't know if she was Serbian or French," he describes. "She said exactly what I wanted to say," explains Michel Houellebecq in this message projected on a giant screen in the Kombank Dvorana amphitheater.
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Admittedly, the writer is "sad" not to have come to Belgrade, but "somewhere deep inside [him]", he is "happy to have witnessed this demonstration of rebellion, which was just and healthy" , to "this brief confrontation with the authority [which] reminds him of the very long French episode of the yellow vests".
While that's true, he's also "a bit ashamed that he wasn't behind it at all." But "the writer, by nature, accepts a little too easily to be 'in the position of observer'".
Why didn't you take the next plane? There are currently three daily connections between Paris and Belgrade and Michel Houellebecq could physically be present despite the cancellation of his initial flight. But "I really don't want to fly back immediately, you have to cancel," he says. "I'm sorry about all this, but I think it could have ended worse." "We cannot congratulate Air Serbia, and I hope at least that they will reimburse you for the tickets, that seems to me the minimum," he judges.
In a statement, the Krokodil festival confirmed the cancellation of Thursday's flight and added that it learned by calling Air Serbia that the writer was "not on the list of passengers scheduled to arrive in Belgrade at 5:25 p.m." the next day. Asked by AFP, Air Serbia did not respond.
