The work of Michel Houellebecq - one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time - is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was bowled over by it and he hunted down a copy of his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation. Houellebecq found in Schopenhauer - the radical pessimist, the chronicler of human suffering, the lonely misanthrope - a powerful conception of the human condition and of the future that awaits us, and when Houellebecq\u0026rsquo;s first writings appeared in the early 1990s, the influence of Schopenhauer was everywhere apparent.  \u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003eBut it was only much later, in 2005, that Houellebecq began to translate and write a commentary on Schopenhauer\u0026rsquo;s work. He thought of turning it into a book but soon abandoned the idea and the text remained unpublished until 2017. Now available in English for the first time, In the Presence of Schopenhauer is the story of a remarkable encounter between a novelist and a philosopher and a testimony to the deep and enduring impact of Schopenhauer\u0026rsquo;s philosophy on one of France\u0026rsquo;s greatest living writers.
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