Breton roots. He was born on April 20, 1980 in Laval, but grew up "in Barentin, in the gray suburbs of Rouen", then in Essonne. "At the same time depressing and sublime", these peripheral places are at the center of his romantic world.

Pale SMILE. "I was a shy child, abnormally contemplative. So much so that my mistress said to my mother: "I am worried, he does not play with others." Everything changes when he arrives, in 8 years, in Essonne: "I discovered social pressure and the need to exist. I became an insolent dunce. "

MENTON Voluntary. "I was sure to write. But for fifteen years I have kept without writing really, except poems and unpublishable news. When his companion becomes pregnant, he resigns from his bookstore and enters his office. In 2010 her daughter, Jeane, was born and her first book, "Houellebecq, romantic writer", was published.

Muscular LEGS . He bought a bike after quitting smoking. When others pedal in open country, he confronts him crossing the suburbs: "I come from the West," he smiled, "I have a taste for melancholy things. The distance did not frighten him: "It is less difficult to travel 100 km by bike than 20 by foot. For his novels, he keeps the rhythm on nearly 500 pages.

CERVEAU Googlisé. "Google is the third hemisphere of my brain," he said. For the second, he claims to have replaced Wikipedia by family memory and recognizes the influence of a monument of youth literature, "The Club of Five."

EYES Blue . And brown hair: the prototype of the beautiful kid who is ignorant. For seven years, he held a bookshop in the Mouffetard district, in Paris. "Some customers came only for his beautiful eyes," says a regular, "he did not notice anything. "I did not go through some crazy erotic years, even though it was there I met my partner. "

LANGUAGE Abstract. A voluntary absence of stylistic effects: "I write as a craftsman rather than as an esthete. I avoid self-mastery. The same sobriety of language in life, to evoke his parents, "cadres in the tertiary," as the recognition of his work, called "narcissistic consolidation"

(*) "Land use planning", ed. Gallimard, in bookstores on August 21st.