Michel Houellebecq has a show of his own art photography opening in Paris on June 23—the day Britain votes on whether to leave the European Union.
In a Financial Times profile, the Frenchman calls himself the greatest living novelist (“I find that he repeats himself. It’s often the same book,” Houellebecq says of pretender to the crown Philip Roth); he invokes his bromance with Iggy Pop; and, discussing his show’s opening on what will doubtless be a fateful day for a decaying Europe, he all but admits to milking his reputation as the master of terrifying timing. Not holding back, he says, “What’s very amusing is that the opening of the exhibition will coincide with a possible Brexit. It’s June 23. It’s going to be hot!”
His fame rose in the wider, less literary world when his novel Submission‘s release coincided with the Charlie Hebdo attack on January 7, 2015. Submission depicts a not-too-distant Europe sliding toward Islamist takeover, losing a cultural civil war. Its publication date—and progressives’ and extremists’ anger over its subject—catapulted the already famous author to international, news-at-11 notoriety.
The dangerous level of fame meant he had to travel with a police escort and keep out of Paris. But controversial prescience was nothing new for the provocateur. On September 10, 2001 of all days, the publishers of his third novel Platform—charged with hate speech in France—broke down and publicly apologized for any offense its anti-Islamic themes may have wrought; Platform, published that August, ends with an Islamic terror attack on a resort in Thailand, remarkably similar to the 2002 Bali attack, among others.
Now, per FT, the oracular Houellebecq has a message for Britain—
Really though, compared to the rest of his record, opening on June 23 is cheating. But it’s also smart publicity. Houellebecq’s photographs draw thematically from his fiction, as from his life and his public persona.
One picture, the first in the exhibition, shows a darkening reddish dusk viewed from his apartment. A line of his, “Il est temps de faire vos jeux,” superimposed onto the bloody sky, warns “It’s time to place your bets”—on the outcome of Europe’s civil war.
