Michel Houellebecq — don’t worry, it’s pronounced Welbeck, just like Danny the soccer player — is surely the most important novelist to have been publishing not only in France but in all of Europe over the past three decades. His work has become renowned for the unnerving accuracy of its insight into the immediate future, making him seem a kind of novelistic Cassandra.
Houellebecq is also France’s most controversial literary figure, long disdained by the media there as an upstart and a vulgarian. His work has always been alarmingly explicit, famously so about fellatio. Beyond his books, Houellebecq has been taken to court for inciting racial hatred (but eventually cleared of all charges), he has been interviewed drunk and propositioned female journalists. Houellebecq has not only not cared about seeming disreputable but actively embraced it, cultivating an aesthetic of dishevelment and repeatedly saying the unsayable.
