Michel Houellebecq's Humanist Side

style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">If the French had a prize for literary provocation, Michel Houellebecq would win in a walk. His life has been a tabloid train-wreck of drink, divorce, lawsuits, Islamophobic outbursts and tax exile to Ireland. His first four novels – Whatever (1994), Atomised (1998), Platform (2001) and The Possibility of an Island (2005), all widely translated – are feasts of misogyny and misanthropy. His main subjects seem to be alienation, consumerism and the importance of sex – lots of it, described in relentless detail. That latter preoccupation has made Houellebecq the rare French novelist who sells well overseas.