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Title: The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq ISBN: 0-375-72701-9 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 November, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.68 (60 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Touches deep nerves
Comment: This is a five star book IMO because:
1) it is tremendously engaging, and even it's 'flaws' and uneven flow just made it better. The sex scenes were unecessary, but hey, only weenies would complain about too many sex scenes. And they are funny.
2) the emotionally raw, completely uninhibited subject matter is... unforgettable, and even though this book has a reputation for being 'a blowtorch', Houllebecq is equally skilled at showing heart, and deep humanity. The description of Bruno's adolescence and the universal desire for human connection and genetic validation was deftly, masterfully handled. This book needed to be written, and Houllebecq had the balls to do it. People who call this book immature for dealing with such powerful emotional territory, or worse yet, those who dismiss this as adolescent banter need to take as long look in the mirror; maybe the book hit a little TOO close to home? Hmmm? This book is imminently compassionate in it's 'harsh cruelty'. It also makes the author out to be an interesting character. Can't wait to read Platform.
Rating: 3
Summary: average
Comment: Michel Houellebecq's novel of 1998 arrived on the scene to critical acclaim and controversy. That it was criticized by its detractors for being too nihilistic probably only made it seem even more important. Amidst the seemingly never-ending parade of little novels The Elementary Particles offered the promise of a heavyweight talent delivering a head-on critique of the way we live now. Unfortunately, the hype notwithstanding, it is not the Great Postmodern Novel.
Set in the last decades of the old century the story is of the lives of two half-brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clement, who were abandoned by their mother, a '60's free spirit, and raised separately by their grandparents. Michel becomes a successful scientific researcher but is an emotionally deadened man with no personal life. Bruno is an educational bureaucrat, occasional writer and heavy consumer of paid sex, although this diversion becomes less compelling once he hits 40 and his sex drive starts to flag. Each brother receives one last chance at love, but it all goes off the rails in a maximally bleak ending. Michel survives the wreckage to continue to work on a scientific breakthrough which paves the way for the replacement of humanity by a race of clones.
Houellebecq can certainly write sharply. Here is Michel at the beginning of the story disposing of his dead canary down the garbage chute:
"He didn't know what was at the end of the chute. The opening was narrow (though large enough to take the canary). He dreamed that the chute opened onto vast garbage cans filled with old coffee filters, ravioli in tomato sauce and mangled genitalia."
This is a promising start. Michel's lab is next introduced by way of a digression about Nils Bohr's Institute of Physics which created an intellectual milieu of a level not seen since the days of the ancient Greeks. But: "Djerzinski had singularly failed to foster such an environment around him. The atmosphere in his research facility was like an office, no better, no worse."
The author serves up other zingers in his totally deadpan style, such as Bruno's acidulous undercutting of Brazil: an object of fascination for stupid Europeans; in reality "a [dump] full of morons obsessed with soccer and Formula One." Elsewhere Houellebecq compares the Duchesse de Guermantes and Snoop Dogg and remarks on the totally second-rate nature of literary success next to true movie or rock star celebrity. He also digs up Aristotle's hilarious notion that small women actually constitute a separate species. Bruno's passing encounter with his father at a massage parlour is likewise a classic example of brutal satire.
The strongest aspect of the novel is the depiction of the bleak and solitary character of modern life, the life of the Hegelian Last Man, for whom comfort and security are as omnipresent and dependable as meaningful human contact and a sense of purpose are lacking - a life of TV dinners, bureaucracy and anti-anxiety pills. Even the debauchery is antiseptic and depressing - middle-aged European civil servants having clinical group sex. If Houellebecq is saying something about modern life, however, he is certainly saying something about modern Europe, which is clearly the vanguard of demographic senescence and spiritual sclerosis. It would be hard to imagine this novel being written in the US or China, still less in wilder regions, such as Bruno's despised Brazil.
While this is all good as far as it goes, the problem is that it goes a little too far. Houellebecq simply goes overboard. The world he creates is monochromatically grey, the characters too flat and their lives too deadened to be interesting. The satire is brilliant when it is on target, but these moments are too few and far between. The author's occasional praise of the feminine or of Love are unconvincing and cloying. His digressions on how to fit love or consciousness into the materialistic framework of science - which appears to be a particularly French preoccupation - amount to nothing more than slinging buzzwords, which is in turn a habitual, albeit not exclusively, French vice. For all its influence in the world, science is rarely successfully incorporated into literary narratives. While a sprinkling of scientific jargon may give the impression that the author is an intellectual ready to tackle Big Ideas, the reality is that scientific concepts are generally of little relevance to immediate human experience, which is the subject matter of literature. The usual result of such efforts - even on the part of those authors who actually understand science at all - is an outpouring of weak or incomprehensible metaphors. The only interesting scientific observation in the book is when Michel notes that if atomic nuclei obeyed a planetary model atoms would have no well-defined chemical identities and chemistry as we know it would be impossible. But lines like "human consciousness could be compared to a field of probabilities in a Fock space" are just gibberish, although the author evidently intends for them to be taken seriously. Likewise the idea of a race of clones replacing humans and doing away with the messy problems of sex and social conflict is obviously weak. Michel is supposed to make some Einstein-like contribution to a genetic theory which allows the transformation of the human race. This is as bogus as it is vague. If it was intended to give the story or the character some greater significance it simply fails.
Overall, this is a well-written, readable novel (although the snippets of poetry in it are singularly flat, even though the author is a prize-winning poet; perhaps something is lost in translation). But it is not a major novel. Comparisons to the work of other celebrated "edgy" writers, Celine in particular, are generally not deserved.
Rating: 5
Summary: Woah. not for everyone. FOR ME.
Comment: First, a quote from Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy," the spirit of which I'd swear animates this novel...
"...An old legend has it that King Midas hunted a long time in the woods for the wise Silenus, companion of Dionysos, without being able to catch him. When he had finally caught him the king asked him what he considered man's greatest good. The daemon remained sullen and uncommunicative until finally, forced by the king, he broke into a shrill laugh and spoke: "Ephemeral wretch, begotten by accident and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be your greatest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is to die soon."
Ok- here's the deal. Either you go in for the bleak, unredemptive, unflinching view of humanity and existence, or you don't. I loved this book. It cut me to the bone and I was glad for it. Houellebecq takes apart our desires, our dreams, our age, all our petty cultural trappings- and exposes them for the broken props that they are. Even The sci-fi bookends of the novel didn't grate too badly, though it ended abruptly.
Houellebecq presents a worldview that only a scabrous, self-hating continental intellectual could craft so well. And thank Doug for that! This is a nihilistic work of highest caliber, a descendant of Celine (though H's misanthropy and nihilism aren't the same strain of gleeful, musical hate as Celine's), Hamsun and Huysmans. So be warned, all is not roses and puppy dogs. Humanity, nature, the world in which we live are reviled in a variety of insights, characters and plotlines, none of which end happily. Incidentally, Celine is even channelled, you might say, in the novel, when Bruno, sickened and humiliated by his own powerlessness attempts to publish some racist tracts in a journal, a la everyone's favorite fascist of the 30's.
Both of the main characters (Bruno and Michel) are offered chances at making a good life for themselves, despite their failings as humans... Both are given a chance at happiness, or, perhaps a bovine contentment... I'll let you find for yourself what happens.
Now, Even if you disagree with any of the perceptions and theories presented in this vitriolic little book, it is still a good thing for you to be exposed to them, as it can only result in you holding your own views with a larger frame of mind. I found this book to be a much needed dose of cold, bathos-sterilizing refreshment. Ah!
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Title: Platform by Michel Houellebecq ISBN: 0375414622 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 15 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Whatever by Michel Houellebecq, Paul Hammond ISBN: 1852425849 Publisher: Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.99 |
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Title: H.P. Lovecraft : Contre le monde, Contre la vie by Michel Houellebecq ISBN: 158348194X Publisher: iUniverse.com Pub. Date: 07 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet, Adriana Hunter ISBN: 0802139868 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine, Ralph Manheim ISBN: 0811208478 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: February, 1988 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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