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Ben Jeffery

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Ancient Curse

Ancient Curse

Houellebecq can be a very lazy writer. He turns characters into mouthpieces for semi-digestible sociological theories.

For all his manifest limitations Houellebecq is a writer who bears thinking about—one of few to have emerged from Europe in the last twenty years with any real claim to importance. It is dispiriting that such a preeminent novelist should also be such a tawdry one, and pointless to deny that much of Houellebecq’s force as a writer derives from his ability to tap into base instincts. Still, he isn’t a fraud.