French novelist and enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq has never been afraid to court controversy. His breakthrough 1998 novel Atomised (also known as The Elementary Particles) won the Dublin literary award but was also described by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times as “a deeply repugnant read.” When Houellebecq won the Prix Novembre for the book in his native France, an internal struggle led one of the judges to resign and the competition to be renamed the Prix Décembre.
Since his chef d’oeuvre was published in 1998, Houellebecq has released a steady stream of novels, most of which are set in societies where the value of individual autonomy has become absolute. This great social malaise, in Houellebecq’s view, may be traced to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which reached its apotheosis with the Summer of Love in the United States, and with the violent upheavals of May 1968 in France.
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