Houellebecq and Cassandra
15th January 2015
So Michel Houellebecq quit promoting his new book. Instead he’s hiding out somewhere in the provinces.
Houellebecq, whose name I despise having to spell, is the French satirical novelist who was featured on the last Charlie Hebdo cover before the January 7th deluge of Islamist blood-whining. I have no inside information as to whether he retreated from the capital out of writerly dramatics, or real fear for his life; the news reports are cagey and I am not, alas, a personal acquaintance of the dour genius who was dragged into court in 2002 for calling Islam the stupidest of all religions.
Houellebecq lost a friend in the Charlie Hebdo shooting, and he is famously indifferent to the safety of his neck and liver, so perhaps he’s more in mourning than in hiding—or it could be that the possibility of a Kalashnikov nudging him in the temple for his blasphemies against the unpleasant prophet is suddenly not so abstract.