By The New York Times (Europe) | Created at 2024-10-08 09:58:43 | Updated at 2024-10-08 12:28:50
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Michel Houellebecq — arguably the most important French writer of the past quarter-century — was perched on the seat of his chair like a bird. We were sitting in his dim Paris apartment in August, a spectacularly beautiful day visible through his curtained windows, to discuss his new novel, “Annihilation,” which appears this week and returns to the themes of male loneliness and civilizational decline that have made his reputation. During our time together, Houellebecq, who is 68, would slump deeper and deeper in his chair, to the point where it seemed he would need help rising, only to pop back up, with unexpected agility, to balance once again on the balls of his feet. I had been trying to ask him about his life, but he was deftly deflecting personal questions — he had been answering them for decades and seemed done with that dance — until I asked him to tell me a little bit about his early life as a reader.
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“I have moved too many times in my life,” he said in his weak, reedy voice. “But I kept one of my favorites.”
Houellebecq rose and searched a bookshelf near at hand, retrieving a small, well-worn book. It was “Les Contes d’Andersen,” a French translation of the Danish fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, No. 28 in “Lectures et Loisirs,” a series of books for children. This particular copy was published in 1960, four years after Houellebecq was born. On its cover, a little mermaid sat on a pink shell, weeping. An oyster, its pearl gleaming, lay open at her feet, and a blue fish with a pink tail and lush eyelashes looked at the mermaid with worry.
I noted the cover, felt the furring at its edges, commented on the mermaid’s tears.
“One would console her right away,” Houellebecq said tenderly, staring at the cover, adding, “immediately.”
Houellebecq sat back down and poured himself a glass of white wine. He was quiet for a long stretch, a common feature of his conversation throughout his career, many interviewers noting that they were unsure, while waiting for him to respond, if he had fallen asleep. This habit drew my attention to his physical presence, which, anyway, is conspicuous. His hair had often been, during his public life, messy and strange, a signature comb-over taking various permutations, sometimes daringly long, always a kinky brownish curtain. Now it was nearly gone, his sparse gray hair swept back. His nose is fantastic, prowlike, and he has large, long ears with those creases across the lobes that internet ads suggest mean heart failure looms. He wore delicate blue-and-white-striped slip-ons, his clothes unchanged across the three days I saw him: baggy black pants salted with cigarette ash and a deep blue shirt that, owing to its epaulets, lent him a vaguely military air. You would assume he chain-smokes, and you would be right, except the term doesn’t go quite far enough; so constant was the smoking that it seemed his cigarettes were little oxygen tanks he drew on to sustain life.
