>>24672183
Houllebecq said his Islamophobia is "mild." I think one thing good literature can't do is justify something. You will end up making excuses. So, he's not interested in defending a nihilistic French society. The book is basically about how the Muslims win because they offer a clear marriage model. This is what the Catholics did for years but it's not working anymore. Whether the system arranges one wife or three wives doesn't really matter as much, either would be better than having no wife at all. No wife = unhappy life.

>>24669766
>Is he just the French equivalent of a MAGA boomer?
Kind of. He's a big pro-Israel guy. He has been there several times, and his books are published in Hebrew and he has been well received there, and he finds female Israeli soldiers erotic. He's behind Israel being brutal in the war with Hamas.

Obviously, he's French. They're a bit different. The so-called Woke movement hasn't really landed there, at least as much. The idea of a French national culture is more important. The French were not like the British either in how they practiced colonialism, the French would try to teach their colonial subjects "how to be French" a bit more. The British always kept a certain distance from their subjects. But that's mirrored today by British-style multiculturalism that keeps people in their own little special ethnic ghettos. Houllebecq is very much against that, and thinks people are trying to stir up hatred between whites and blacks in France where there is none. He loathes Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the French left. I think he'd find a future where a bunch of different ethnic elements are feuding with each other to be worse than Islam.