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Loading... Platformby Michel Houellebecq
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Second and final chance for Houellebecq. Is he an attention-grabbing poseur or a boundary-challenging iconoclast? He is a poseur, and a narrow-minded one at that. Any book that contains not one but too anonymous "big black men" is sloppy, and the sex just comes across as wishful thinking. (  )TomSlee | May 18, 2009 |   some nice and critical reflections on society, sometimes depressing, sometimes badly written scenes, very explicit about sex. the good thing about the book is that the main character is somewhat of a anti-hero, and you don't really like him, which is difficult, because it is written from the I-perspective. The story is alright with a cruel ending. It contains a lot of explicit sexual scenes, even when absolutely does not add value to the story. A lot of scenes are written badly, most contemplations on society are written very well. (  )hennis | Dec 26, 2008 | 1  Houellebecq is France's Chuck Palahniuk, right down to the unpronounceable last name. Palahniuk spices up his flat writing style with typically American sensationalism: explosions, trick endings, beauty queens gone bad. Houellebecq uses sex, then more sex, and a little more sex, and an lack of PCness that only a European could get away with. Houellebecq's protagonists, unlike Palahniuk's, never rise above the ordinary, remaining plain, pathetic men right to the depressing end. And finally, unlike the rather quirky Palahniuk, Houellebecq is advertised as The Real Thing, a bonafide drunk, mysoginist, nihilistic nympho author targeted by the Arab world as an enemy of Islam. Reading Plateforme, one gets the impression that the distance between Houellebecq and his narrator is further than the media would have you believe. He too seems tired of his narrator and his plot by the end of the work. I like his purposefully plain narrative style and enjoy the titillation, but if you come to this book looking for more than that, looking for American explosions or true degeneracy, you will be disappointed. Sarasamsara | Dec 22, 2008 | 1 Ein Meisterwerk (  )coster | Dec 30, 2007 | My final reaction to Plateforme is: how and why do literary circles and academics continue to take Houellebecq seriously? He so clearly writes from a tired, abused boilerplate: an autobiographical, socially inept protagonist with no redeeming qualities; a shallow social/economic premise left undeveloped, weakly supported by unconvincing dialog and characters; tepidly shocking sexist and racist comments inserted at the conclusion of every chapter -- presumably to leave the reader with a moment of mild titillation in which to ponder his attempt at writing something worthy of intellectual consideration. We know that Houellebecq doesn't really inhabit these cheap, facile, adolescent stabs at what are meant to be shocking generalizations, so what is the point? All of this wouldn't be so condemning, however, if the prose wasn't so terrifically flat and uninteresting. And the lazy, derivative winks to Camus only illuminate Houellebecq's insincere ennui in comparison. Yawn. (I read the French version) (  )aralena | Nov 11, 2007 | 1 0.055 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0099437880, Paperback)Michel Renault is a human void. Following the death of the father he barely knew, he endures his civil ser-vice job while eking out an existence of prepackaged pleasure, hollow friendships, TV dinners, and pornography. On a group holiday in Thailand, however, he meets the shyly compelling Valérie, who soon pursues an agenda that Michel himself could never have thought possible: his own humanization. Back in Paris, they plunge into an affair that strays into S&M, public sex, and partner swapping, even as they devise a scheme to save Valérie’s ailing travel company by capitalizing on the only trade Michel has seen flourish in the Third World. Before long, he quits his job, and their business model for “sex tourism” is gradually implemented. But when they return to Thailand, where Michel’s philosophy will be put into practice, he discovers that sex is neither the most consuming nor dangerous of passions . . . From a suburbanized West crippled by hate crime to an East subsumed by materialism, Michel Houellebecq explores—with characteristic provocativeness, but also with surprising tenderness—the emotions that seem most resilient to any influence: love and hate. Platform is, as Anita Brookner has written, “a brilliant novel, casting a prescient eye on the abuses and inequalities that lead to wider trouble.” (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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