Michel Houellebecq

Fire takes five of his ten planets, water three, and a single one apiece in earth and air, with four of the ten fixed and four mutable. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record is one line: Houellebecq is a French novelist whose books provoke reliable controversy.

Venus sits in hard contact with Saturn at fifteen hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is warmth meeting a wall: feeling unworthy, delay or coldness in affection, and a person who withholds first to avoid being refused. For a novelist the record describes only by the reaction his work gets, that is the single tightest thing the chart has and it is about the inside rather than the reaction.

The Moon stands at an awkward angle to Mercury at under four tenths of a degree, what is felt and what is said pulling apart, and its sign is certain at ten degrees of Virgo, settling a feeling by finding a task. Mars sits at that same awkward angle to Uranus at half a degree. One planet in earth and one in air, with five in fire, is the balance: this chart charges at things and has very little to hold them in place or talk them over afterwards. Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the four retrograde planets. A novelist the record describes only by the reaction he gets has a chart that charges and does not hold, which is a description of a temperament and not of a book.

Saturn came back to its Sagittarius birth degree on 18 October 2015, at fifty nine, and that is a second Saturn return rather than a first. Sagittarius measures a thing by the distance it got from where it started, so a second return there asks whether the distance was worth the going, which for a writer whose record is a pattern of reactions rather than a list of books is a question the record cannot answer and the chart certainly cannot.