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The work of Michel Houellebecq is often punctuated by frequent "trips" to shopping centers: convenience stores, supermarkets, hypermarkets, the works. Rather than signaling a moment of rupture or decline in the narrative, these visits are a reflection on the human condition faced with the banality of everyday life which requires, among other things, putting food on the table. Being no stranger to paradoxes, Houellebecq in fact takes a benign view of shopping centers as places of sociability, sometimes serving as a form of social haven, or even of distinction.