The mark of a true controversialist may be the ability to lean back, fag in mouth, and shrug that there's nothing that controversial about controversy. It's no big deal, he says.
Polemical debates happen all the time in France.
This was quite a big one, but any attentive reader of the French press gets bored if there isn't one every three months - it's part of the national character. I get bored with it. It is precisely because of Houellebecq's assault on the national character that his readers hold him in such reverence - or such contempt. Atomised is an ambitious dissection of the modern French social psyche that traces its malaises to the supposed annus mirabilis , 1968. Countless French fictions complain about that year's radical dreams going awry, but Houellebecq goes so far as to identify soixante-huitisme as the beginning of the end for French society.