Michel Houellebecq is the ageing enfant terrible of French literature. His new book imagines a France ruled by Islamists and he has been under 24-hour police protection since the Charlie Hebdo attack. Does he really hate women and Muslims or is he just a twisted provocateur?
Interview by Angelique Chrisafis
Shadowed by the plain-clothes police protection officer that now follows him round the clock, Michel Houellebecq, France’s most successful living writer, shuffles into his Paris publisher’s office. His quiet, otherworldly aura is enhanced by the anti-fashion statement of this ageing literary enfant terrible: too-short cord trousers that swing round his ankles, a C&A parka he is rarely without, comfortable shoes and the black backpack he takes everywhere containing his stash of Philip Morris cigarettes, which he smokes between his middle and ring fingers, smoothing his frizzy combover with a nicotine-stained finger.
“It fosters seclusion,” he says of life under constant police guard since January’s terrorist attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. “You concentrate and get on with what you have to do. It reduces your social life.”
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