Michel Houellebecq celebrates his birthday today

Michel Houellebecq is not among the richest writers in the world, because he does not write entertaining novels. However, he is certainly among those most gifted with the gift of prognostication.

Thus, back in 2019, one French critic wrote, referring to the traditional protagonist of Houellebecq's novels, that there is no longer any point in saving the "old lonely white man" if he is doomed by the course of history. And where this critic is now, more than five years later, only her colleagues know, but the "old white man" Donald Trump has just become president of the United States.

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However, before him, an even older white man, Joe Biden, was president of the United States, but we mentioned Trump first because Houellebecq, even in his first presidential term, admired him for his protectionist measures in support of the American economy. By the way, Houellebecq at one time approved of "Brexit", although he cannot stand the British.

Returning to the gift of prophecy, Houellebecq is believed to have predicted the Bali bombings that followed a year later in his 2002 novel Platform, which deals with sex tourism and terrorism. Houellebecq's portrait was featured on the cover of the popular humor magazine Charlie Hebdo shortly before its offices were shot up by terrorists. And in Submission, published in 2015, the writer depicted a future France living under Sharia law after a Muslim won the 2022 presidential election.

But here it must be said that in the latter case, Houellebecq, of course, was not making an accurate forecast, but wrote a social dystopia, like Orwell in his time, who also hardly considered 1984 to be a precise date. But in "Serotonin" Houellebecq predicted the emergence of the "yellow vests" movement literally a few months before it actually emerged.

At the same time, Houellebecq became an idol of the European intelligentsia back in the late 90s for his depiction of the literally boundless loneliness of the Europeans of those years, plus the awareness of the futility of the Old World way of life - again, of those years.

But in the last few years, nothing has been heard about Houellebecq as a writer (he regularly gets into some kind of celebrity scandals). Perhaps because the sleepy Europe that he used to describe and criticize suddenly woke up for real - and he did not foresee this.

In any case, Houellebecq is rich - back in the mid-2000s, a French publisher paid him a million euros in advance for his new novel "The Possibility of an Island", without having read a single line of the manuscript. He himself says that money makes him part of the globalist elite, which he criticizes in his novels. But, again, as befits a rich Frenchman, he treats money with respect, and high taxes were one of the reasons for his departure from France. Now, however, having lived in Ireland, and then in Spain, he has returned home.

He is married for the third time, and to a young woman from Southeast Asia, whom he admired so much in terms of sex tourism in his novels. Finally, a few years ago, the French president awarded him, a fierce critic of modern France, another Legion of Honor.

So the life of the "singer of loneliness" has been very successful.

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