He's a sexist Stalinist eugenicist. He's also a pornographer and a homophobe. Houellebecq is France's biggest literary sensation in 20 years - and his suffering is enormous. To spend a weekend in his company is to become an unwitting participant in a sensory-deprivation experiment. External stimuli are reduced to a minimum.
Physical movement is discouraged.
Likewise, talking and eating, and any other activity that might detract from the primary objective - getting from Saturday morning to Sunday night with as little conscious awareness as possible. When I rang the bell of his suburban town house in June, I was the first person to have done so in quite some time. Houellebecq answered the door in stockinged feet, blinked at me with his sad, brown eyes and ushered me into the living room. He curled up in a chair with a pack of Silk Cuts and a bottle of Jim Beam and hardly moved for the entire weekend. He murmured obligingly in response to my questions, but finishing a sentence often proved beyond him.