Michel Houellebecq’s Platform

I am not a superstitious person, nor do I have any faith in the supernatural, but I believe some rare figures throughout history have had the gift of prophecy. Doubtless their fortunetelling owes more to some heightened intellectual sensitivity than […]

Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised

It is my growing conviction that Michel Houellebecq is the most important living novelist, though it isn’t exactly easy to explain why. On a sentence-by-sentence basis, there are at least a dozen writers alive today who are his betters, and […]

Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility Of An Island

Much of the criticism surrounding Michel Houellebecq’s work in general, and The Possibility Of An Island in particular, revolves around the unhappiness – we might even call it gloom – he generates in his readers. His characters are rarely very sympathetic; there is […]

Michel Houellebecq’s Submission

I must begin by thanking my brother Kenneth, both for recommending Submission to me and for shipping it across the Atlantic when our dismal Montreal bookstores could not furnish a copy. Michel Houellebecq was unknown to me before January of […]