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“... bad smell given off by its contents. Les Particules élémentaires is only the second novel that Michel Houellebecq has written, but a book as boldly out of tune with the times as this will have no trouble outliving the flush of suspect publicity that might have led to its swift eclipse. It is aggressive in thought, often enough tacky in deed, and ...”

“... Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory tells the story, from the standpoint of a future art history, of a canonical artist of the early 21st century, a Frenchman with the curiously American-sounding name Jed Martin. Such a backward-gazing Künstlerroman invites comparison with the trajectory of the author himself ...”

“... This is the third of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, and in it, as in the previous two, his hero yearns, mostly in vain, for men and women who are strangers to each other to reach out spontaneously and touch each other: for men to be able to dispense with verbal courtship, for women to put aside cultural restraint, discrimination and any desire to be seduced; and for the sexes to spend as much time as they can cope with in mutually rewarding fornication ...”

“... Towards the end of Michel Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), translated into English under the dismal title Whatever (1998), the nameless protagonist falls into a severe depression. He leaves a note on his desk saying ‘I AM SICK,’ and checks himself into a ‘rest home ...”

“... Michel Houellebecq​ ’s novel about a Muslim takeover of France is a melancholy tribute to the pleasure of surrender. It’s 2022, a charismatic Islamist politician called Mohammed Ben Abbes has become president, and France has fallen under his spell. Houellebecq’s timing could hardly have been better: Soumission was published on 7 January, the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre ...”

“... The strange pleasure​ of reading Michel Houellebecq, when he’s writing well, lies in the sense of being pinned down by a veteran sniper. He’s a shrewd ideological marksman, skilled at taking cover behind one set of values so as to get a better aim on another. Empathy is routinely booby-trapped, while satire can yield little surges of feeling ...”

“... impossible to read’). But those tidy containers have long since been smashed. The first book Michel Houellebecq published was H.P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie, which describes the stories that made Wilson wince as constituting a ‘gigantic dream machine of astounding breadth and efficacy’.Lovecraft himself thought of his work as the ...”

“... four) and won the Prix Interallié (whose other winners include Malraux, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq). He says his biggest regret is not being English, and indeed, despite his quickly achieved yet continuing fame in France, he is almost unknown here. In the opening pages of Artificial Snow, the narrator misses the last métro, just as he ...”

“... category of French novels that have sold well in the English-speaking world, by authors such as Michel Houellebecq, Virginie Despentes and Frédéric Beigbeder. But even by these standards, Garcia’s debut cuts a dash. Hate confidently re-creates the Paris gay scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with the wider political disappointments and ...”

“... 23 languages and made into a movie. ‘Today, we are the two most important writers in France,’ Michel Houellebecq told Carrère in late 2018. For Houellebecq, putting another writer on the same plane as himself was a rare display of modesty, but the fact of Carrère’s two decades of critical and commercial success ...”

“... feelings of minorities. Some of the latter might have been thinking of the blanket publicity for Michel Houellebecq and his new novel, Soumission, on TV and in print in the week preceding the attack on the magazine. Those with longer memories might have recalled Houellebecq’s statement in 2001, which laid the basis ...”

“... is asked to leave the retreat to say a few words at the funeral. (‘Ideally it should have been Michel Houellebecq,’ but Houellebecq is in hiding because his novel about Islamist fundamentalism, Submission, has just been published.) The taxi driver who takes Carrère to the station is upset. ‘Four days earlier ...”

“... that there are more of them in countries that don’t have an established MFA culture. Consider Michel Houellebecq, who last year attempted to block the release of an experimental porn film in which he’d starred. (His defence was that he’d been drunk when he signed the contract.) Manny’s new colleagues on the stand-up MFA aren’t inclined to ...”

“... or the resistant Teflon-coated style of such Modernistes-nouveaux as Tom McCarthy and Michel Houellebecq; nor is it an attempt to demonstrate the semantic clumping we might expect once consciousness becomes fully technically mediated; rather it’s simply that transposition of style and methodology which is to be expected when an artist ...”

“... as long as it’s not Islamic. Denunciations of Islam have been relentless in France, with Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Soumission (the word Islam means ‘submission’), the latest salvo. It predicts the country being ruled by a president from a group he calls the Muslim Fraternity. Charlie Hebdo, we should not forget, ran a cover ...”