You are a handsome man, in the classic Gallic sense, much like Alain Delon and Gerard Depardieu, but without the refined beauty and sexual appeal of Michel Houellebecq. Do you envy the famed author and Asian Waifu-Getter of Submission?
Like all “journalists”, I am a failed writer, so of course I envy him. But at least he continues to demonstrate that the most important writer in the world at any given time is French.
To me Houellebecq is like the Sin-Eaters of old; he has done the world a great service by absorbing all of the ugliness of modernity to spare us from it, while allowing it to disfigure his face. He is our mirror.
The interesting thing about the Houellebecq phenomenon is that when I was a student my lefty friends were pressing his books into my hands and I as a Catholic conservative stoutly proclaimed that I wouldn’t read the works of a nihilst pornographer, while now it is conservatives who hail him as a prophet. Houellebecq is unquestionably a genius, in the following manner: being able to sense, and capture, and paint, the zeitgeist of a particular era is something that many try and most fail at. This requires a kind of genius which is very rare. Does that mean that he is a literary genius? That’s a different question. I’m incapable of doing what he does, so I am hesitant to criticize his dreary prose style. But of course it is the style that fits the zeitgeist as well. It’s a package. He is a kind of Trump of literature; just like Trump’s grotesque of politics shows us what our politics really are by defacing them, Houellebecq’s grotesque of literature shows us what our world really is by defacing it.
Niccolo Soldo, “The Zürich Interviews – Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Unrepentant Baguette Merchant”, Fisted by Foucault, 2020-12-02.
November 10, 2026
QotD: Michel Houellebecq
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