The Elementary Particles

The Good:
Beginning with his strengths, Houellebecq can write good prose even in translation. I noticed a pattern by which he produces the impression of succinctness/completion by placing the second descriptive sentence of a paragraph at its end: What would have been the second introductory detail closes the following paragraph,

“...Sometimes he cycles cross-country, pedaling as hard as he can, filling his lungs with a taste of the infinite. He does not know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is a brief one. The countryside flashes past.”

H. employs this twist many times, and I wouldn't call it a cheap trick.

The Bad:
Houellebecq doesn't write bad science fiction. He uses bad science to write bad fiction. Perhaps standards were show more different in the early aughts, but a modern reader can tell H. has no specialization or interest in science beyond its service in supporting his ideology. It is impossible to believe H.'s affected scientific tone with its repetitions and buzzwords, especially after having read the late work of DFW. (Compare this work with DFW's Mister Squishy, which allows the science to speak for itself and provide the negative space in which the story exists.)

The response to accusations of misogyny (and worse) remains that the author has somehow maintained a subtle form of ironic distance. We simply are too offended to provide an objective literary critique. Yet we all know that which is said half in jest is already more than truthful. It's incredibly naive to imagine that Houellebecq’s fans aren't enjoying precisely the 'misogynistic' aspects of the work they disavow in public. H.'s misogyny is well-tailored to the STEM youth of today, who appreciate any excuse to use 'science' to justify the social perspective they already possess. (Note: One finds a similar pattern within certain branches of ‘evo-psych’, which continues to gain popularity among reactionaries.)

Of course, it is possible to read work one disagrees with (and to enjoy it too!). Unfortunately that is not possible in this case, because such trappings as ‘prose’ and ‘style’ are more or less completely dissipated after the exposition. From then on it's a prolonged, unpleasant coitus until the epilogue. There, the pseudo-science makes a triumphant return, and we are made to believe that the ‘love’ portrayed in the novel, too archetypal and reactionary to be real, was something other than pure illusion. show less

This was a disgusting read.
And a beautiful read.

I felt I was reading pornography, but then there was a decent and engaging story, and like a person of culture I was 'watching it for the plot'. But slowly and gradually, the characters started to develop; feeling disgusted in their acts, feeling hopeless and lost, unable to make friends at/after work. The pornography started morphing into erotica, becoming more stylised and sensual from the initial burning mess.

After some time the book became the equivalent of a 'post-nut' clarity, but as the book goes, that clarity explores so much: the mess, the horror and the lonliness.

Towards the ends the sex, the drugs, the infedility, the crass hedonism was not crass but the actuality that life is: show more there is degradation and that isnt 90% of of (most) of our lives, but becomes background noise that is sometimes is heard (feels like an unsinkable advert which lasts a short 30sec ) was we feel drowned by the drudgery of waking up, going to work, and coming back home: we forget the things that make us human. The headaches and the mellow warm cups of coffee. The Yin and the Yang. The honesty of this books is disgusting yet refreshing.

The novel is a fantastic read. show less

This is a very difficult book to review because it is both very very good but also very strange and even self-indulgent in a bad way. What exactly is it? An extension of the rant started in 'Whatever'? A philosophical tale in the classic French tradition? A novel?

If it is a rant, it is more subdued than 'Whatever'. The same 'Eeyore' outlook on the world. The same detached misanthropy. The same existential despair where even Kierkegaard might have said, 'oh, for chrissake, lighten up, Michel'.

As a philosophical 'conte' it is a failure unless it is trying to satirise the French literary 'novel of ideas' in which case it is a success. But as a traditional novel it is superb, dark, honest, compassionate and inciting thought about our own show more and the human condition.

The book is peppered with non-fictional sections that don't stand up to much scrutiny twenty years after its publication. They lead up to a transhumanist fantasy which can only be described as a cop-out. I see why he has it there but, while the didacticism may be very French, it is also very silly.

If the author had cut out the philosophical and pseudo-scientific crap and given us his ruthless dissection of our human species as it stands, cutting the novel by 100 pages, I would have classed this as a work of near genius. Being too obvious a novelist of ideas may not be Michel's strength.

Houllebecq takes two children, half brothers, of a dysfunctional mother from the post-war libertarian generation that he clearly loathes and then creates a form of literary Totentanz as these two very different characters' lives periodically intersect and demonstrate parallel histories.

One, Bruno, is a classic bullied beta male who is driven by unfulfilled desire, a hunt for intimacy but at times with all the grace of an incel, until, at some point, his desperately sad existence comes alive with the discovery of a form of love with an aging swinger.

Houllebecq's sensitive genius conveys something quite remarkable - the subtle interplay between loveless sexual activity (many will find the scenes pornographic when they are merely culturally descriptive) and that activity being an enabler of intimacy and love between the like-minded.

He achieves the unusual feat of making the world of swingers and the far beaches at Cap d'Agde seem more authentic and even decent by far than the self-deluding pre-woke world of hippydom, free love and a spirituality that evades the brute facts of lubricant sex and death.

The other half-brother, Michel, is the polar opposite. He is an asexual to all intents and purposes who has a difficulty with intimacy and commitment and yet is capable of selfless engagement as his version of mid-life crisis. He is also connected to his half-brother regardless of all this.

His adolescent love Annabelle reappears in his life decades later and it is clear that she was broken in a way by the mismatch between her romantic aspirations and his asexuality. They come together in the end but it is a brief clinging together that cannot evade death.

Michel is a cold fish, a loner, who lives entirely for his intellect and whose contribution to science will provide the absurd philosophical coda to the novel. His mid-life crisis is not madness brought on by thwarted sexual longing (as it is for Bruno) but a losing of himself into a theory.

Michel's is the other side of Bruno's somewhat cowardly libertine authenticity. If Bruno is the beta male making his den in the forest of sex where he can, Michel stands outside the games humans play and represents a form of detachment from the human condition.

The final and important sexual relationships of the two men take place in near parallel and both end in the similar deaths of their partners and descents into their 'normal' responses to their states of being without relationships - madness on the one side and total detachment on the other.

But the book has to be read rather than analysed. It will probably mean most to men between the ages of (around) 40 - the classic mid-life crisis era - and 60 when it finally sets in that sexual adventure may be dead or at least dying. It is an angry book about unwanted conditions.

Sex and death are central to the book. The hard and unflinching accounts of both are really what make this book great. But it is death where he comes into his own - people die hard and without hope in this book or deluded to the end, often leaving the wreckage of other lives behind them.

Houllebecq reports the numbness and confusion of grief as if he was God's journalist. And his ability to get inside the minds of his creations and make them come alive is remarkable. These are not stupid people but people trapped by their histories into ways of seeing and behaving.

Nor is the popular myth of Houllebecq as misogynist borne out in this book. On the contrary, he is an equal opportunity depressive and critic - he castigates both sexes of the narcissist generation and shows an inherent compassion to his victim women as well as his victim men.

When good things happen (which is not often), they happen when damaged men and women come together briefly without hope and find something that we can all recognise as love even if it is not lasting and not because things change in the hearts of the characters.

There is, of course, a politics hidden in here. More than once, the National Front is mentioned without standard issue liberal disapproval. Catholic conservative themes and tropes thread through the novel. There are throwaways lines about social decay, delinquency and Arabs.

But it is not a simple politics because it always retains its compassion for those who are victims of a social order created by self-regarding alpha individualists. The politics is a rewriting of goodness to a degree where what would later be called populism offers a form of social justice all of its own.

And this is what is so odd about his occult book - it manages to be despairing about progress and the human condition, depressive, misanthropic and negative and yet also deeply compassionate about the victims of evolution, the wasteful outcome of a cruel God's dabbling (if he is even there).

It is the compassion, inherent to the authorial point of view, that offers us something quite familiar in Western culture, a form of godless would-be catholicism, where the values of the past linger on despite the self-evident Death of God announced by Nietzsche.

Houlebecq's solution seems to be to wipe out the failed human experiment through some form of scientific endeavour that removes sex and death from the world so that humanity can die off slowly as no longer essential and be happy to do so as its successors look on with compassion.

It is an extremely well written (once you ignore the non-fiction boring bits) response to Nietzsche that speaks for itself. There is anger masked by detachment in this book. Repressed anger generally manifests itself as depression. The art is to see the emotion behind the detachment show less

Trash. Provocation masquerading as courage. Apparently one way to be considered a "serious" novelist is to use your god-given gift with the pen to compare gays to pedophiles. Not winning enough prestigious literary awards? Ramp it up by comparing black people to baboons. When all else fails, make every woman in your book either a whore or hag who doesn't really speak much. Though you shouldn't waste time thinking about women when you could be writing a masturbation scene, or a pages-long, equally masturbatory monologue about philosophy, always, ALWAYS, describe the exact shape and size of their breasts. This is called characterization. As soon as possible after describing their breasts, kill them off. And make sure that it is absolutely show more clear that the point of their death is to be a turning point in the development of the male POV characters.

Besides being offensive as hell, this book also shows why we don't like the "novel of ideas." They are always tedious and condescending, as this book is. Also the ideas are dogshit and have aged terribly. Houellebecq is a reactionary. His big thing is the decline of the west. If he had his way the sexual revolution would have never happened and there would be no muslims in Europe. Love it. Loooooveeee it. show less

Ein gut geschriebener, jedoch ausgesprochen trostloser Lesestoff (siehe oben) - jede kleine Hoffnung auf ein bisschen Glück für die Protagonisten dieses Buches wurde nach wenigen Seiten wieder zerstört. Mehrfach wollte ich das Buch weglegen, aber dann war ich doch zu neugierig ob nicht wenigstens einem der Brüder ein kleines Lebensglück auf Dauer vergönnt sein möge.
Alles nur reine Phantasie? Ich weiss nicht... Auch wenn das Buch keine Freude im herkömmlichen Sinn beim Lesen bereitet - zum Nachdenken regt es auf jeden Fall sehr an. Und das ist mehr, als viele Bücher können!

Exceptional storytelling and narrative. Houellebecq dissects the post-baby-boom generation ruthlessly in a novel about a future genius and his brother, who are essentially two sides of the same person. Often brilliantly funny, sometimes affectionate, occasionally grim, always crass. Houellebecq has been criticised for chauvinist attitudes in his books but I felt this one worked as a valuable artifact of feminism (and a criticism of the coarser elements of male identity), as well as being a brilliantly spun yarn.

We all know that there are three things the French are really good at: philosophy, cookery, and sex. This book tells you very little about cooking, but it does establish a serious claim to French excellence in the field of obsessive masturbation, an event in the sexual olympiad that was previously dominated by American and British novelists. But Houellebecq's Bruno puts Brian Aldiss's Hand-Reared Boy and even Roth's immortal Portnoy into the shadow as a wanker: I think we have a new champion...

Maybe I wasn't in the right mood for this, but it didn't really work for me. Houellebecq's satirical dissection of the flaws of late-20th century materialism is penetrating and occasionally very funny, but his notion of tying this in with ideas show more from fundamental physics and biotechnology to construct some kind of grand theory of humanity (presumably also meant satirically) felt rather bolted-on, and didn't make all that much sense. It's all a bit like Mulisch and The Discovery of Heaven — the knowledge that the 20th century was about to end seems to have pushed all sorts of otherwise quite respectable writers into the notion that they were going to write the Great Y2K Novel. (The comparison with Mulisch isn't confined to the millenarian aspects: Houellebecq turns out to be almost as nasty to his female characters as Mulisch is.) show less