This guy really captures the zeitgeist. He doesn't give a fuck about what people think of him and his thoughts are interesting on how fucked western civilization is.
he was born in the french island of réunion in the indian ocean in 1956 (or, perhaps, 1958, he thinks). abandoned soon afterwards by his hippie mother, he was raised mostly in french exurbs, and has ended up incapable of believing in anything. read against this background, his philosophical novels are peculiarly autobiographical. his standard main character is a godless frenchman bereft of family and other traditional structures, living in an ugly modern world in which everything — especially sex — has been reduced to a consumerist free market.
Houellebecq is an archetypal black piller: believes in nothing except what he intuits to be real, and is driven to the real because in a dying civilization, everything — especially emotion — is fake..