Michel Houellebecq --Enfant terrible of French lit?

I just read this extremely entertaining article by Brendan Bernhard in LA Weekly about the French writer Michel Houellebecq (pronounced "wellbeck" he tells us). Click on the title above to go to the article or insert this URL:

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/31/features-bernhard.php

The sad truth is that I have yet to read any of Hoellebecq's novels, but I will be out tracking them down later today. They sound rather strange, dark, nihilistic, negative, and wonderfully French. The portrait of the author as depicted in this article is of a 47-year-old over-caffeinated Frenchman living in Ireland who occasionally spouts off brilliant remarks between rather sleepy episodes of daily tedium. Here are a few choice quotes from Bernhard's piece:

"Few doubt his intelligence on the page, however, or the sense of isolation and loneliness that underlies his satire. The tone of his work is one of radical estrangement and ennui, and his books are studded with statements bleak even for a French writer who was once frequently treated for nervous depression."

And this one:

"Houellebecq’s first novel, Whatever, was about a bored, deeply unhappy software engineer who travels around France with a pitifully ugly co-worker, teaching a new computer program to business clients. It was short, pithy and filled with a visceral loathing for just about everything. (“I hate this life. I definitely do not like it,” the narrator says. “The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.”) It was based at least partly on the author’s own life and had the unmistakable tang of reality. (During the 1980s, he worked as an agricultural engineer and debugged computers for the French National Assembly, often traveling around the country to do so.) As he would continue to do in his next two novels, Houellebecq had given voice to a class of people — alienated white-collar office workers, basically — who tend to be ignored by literary novelists."

Until finally:

“He is obviously very secluded, very isolated, there are many parts to him that he doesn’t show,” (Olivier) Touraine said afterward (of Houellebecq). “In a way he is an enfant terrible in a generic French way, burning the candle at both ends. But he is also the best contemporary French writer.”

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