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"Michel Houellebecq is often labeled as a cynical and depressive writer. It seems to me rather improbable that people rush to buy a purely "depressing" literature. Success in the bookshop proves instead that his readers, against polemics and anathemas agreed, instinctively feel that his books offer something else. To read Houellebecq is to make the test of a resistance to the contemporary world, it is to perceive this link which through laughter and empathy defies the "progressive obliteration of human relations"; it is above all to understand why poetry alone can triumph over the desolation which is our common lot. Against suffering, one possible consolation: literature.» --Stock