Michel Houellebecq - Criticisms

Criticisms

Literary critics have labeled Michel Houellebecq's novels 'vulgar,' 'pamphlet literature' and 'pornography;' he has been accused of obscenity, racism, misogyny and Islamophobia. His works, particularly 'Atomised' were poorly received by French literary intelligentsia; and though the critical response internationally was more positive, there were notably poor reviews in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani and Anthony Quinn, Perry Anderson, as well as mixed reviews from the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, without ignoring the book's grotesquerie, Lorin Stein from Salon, now editor of The Paris Review, made a spirited defense:

"Houellebecq may despair of love in a free market, but he takes love more seriously, as an artistic problem and a fact about the world, than most polite novelists would dare to do; when he brings his sweeping indignation to bear on one memory, one moment when things seemed about to turn out all right for his characters, and didn’t, his compassion can blow you away."

Here is Houellebecq's response to negative reviews, ten years later:

"First of all, they hate me more than I hate them. What I do reproach them for isn’t bad reviews. It is that they talk about things having nothing to do with my books—my mother or my tax exile—and that they caricature me so that I’ve become a symbol of so many unpleasant things—cynicism, nihilism, misogyny. People have stopped reading my books because they’ve already got their idea about me. To some degree of course, that’s true for everyone. After two or three novels, a writer can’t expect to be read. The critics have made up their minds."

Houellebecq has been accused of polemic stunts for the media. The author's statements in interviews and from his novels, led to the accusation that he was anti-Islamic. In 2002, a court acquitted Houellebecq of spreading racial hatred after he declared "Islam the stupidest of all religions". He was sued by a civil-rights group for hate speech and won on the grounds of freedom of expression.