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The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq
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An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel–part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence.
Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist wholly immersed in the solitude of his work. Each is ultimately offered a final chance at genuine love, and what unfolds is a brilliantly caustic and unpredictable tale.
Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.
- Sales Rank: #87636 in Books
- Color: Brown
- Brand: Houellebecq, Michel
- Published on: 2001-11-13
- Released on: 2001-11-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .60" w x 5.20" l, .49 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Amazon.com Review
Bruno and Michel are half-brothers, born to a hippie mother who believed in following her bliss. As boys they live in ignorance of each other--at one point attending the same school without knowing of their blood connection. As grown men they're not truly close, but they occasionally phone each other late at night. Bruno's a hopeless sexual obsessive, often drunk or on his way there, and Michel's a molecular biologist, distant and inaccessible.
Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles follows these brothers through the latter half of the 20th century. Bruno and Michel are buffeted by history, vessels of disappointment and desire rocked by the ocean of time. Shuttled away to a boarding school where he's sexually abused by other boys, Bruno grows up full of twisted sexual longings and a contempt for aging women so palpable that at times it's stomach-churning. At a commune in the country, Bruno takes stock: The women were intolerable at breakfast, but by cocktail hour the mystical tarts were hopelessly vying with younger women once again. Death is the great leveler. On Wednesday afternoon he met Catherine, a fifty-year-old who had been a feminist of the old school. She was tanned, with dark curly hair; she must have been very attractive when she was twenty. Her breasts were still in good shape, he thought when he saw her by the pool, but she had a fat ass. Michel doesn't hate women; he doesn't even notice them. Instead of leering at bodies by the pool, he stares at particles in microscopes. He wins prizes for his experiments, but never experiences the rush of life. For both men, the damage has been done by history, by mother, before the story begins. What interests Houellebecq are the permutations and recapitulations of damage--the way the particles of the self can never be completely reconstituted. --Emily White
From Publishers Weekly
Houellebecq's controversial novel, which caused an uproar in France last year, finally reaches our shores. Whether it will make similar waves here remains to be seen, but its coolly didactic themes and schematic characterizations keep it from transcending faddish success. The story follows two half brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Cl ment. They have in common a minor Messalina of a mother, Janine Ceccaldi, who contributed most effectively to their upbringing by abandoning them--Bruno to his maternal grandmother, and Michel to Janine's second husband's mother. Bruno's is the harder life. Abused by fellow students at a boarding school, he grows into a perpetually horny adolescence, his sexual advances always rebuffed because he is ugly and devoid of personal charm. He spends the '70s and '80s exposing himself to young girls or masturbating. After his first marriage fails, he meets Christiane at an "alternative" vacation compound with a reputation for free love, and together they embark on a tawdry swingers' odyssey. Meanwhile, Michel (whose story is told in counterpoint) is so emotionally remote that he is unable to kiss his first girlfriend, the astonishingly beautiful Annabelle. In college, he loses sight of her and devotes himself to science, finally becoming a molecular biologist. Then, at 40, he meets Annabelle again. However, as Houellebecq puts it, "In the midst of the suicide of the West, it was clear that they had no chance." Once death cheats both Bruno and Michel of happiness, Michel develops the basis for eliminating sex by cloning humans. The novel is burdened throughout with Houellebecq's message, which equates sex with consumerism and ever darker fates. The writer also upholds the madonna-whore polarization, pigeonholing his female characters with tiresome predictability. Still, it isn't the ideology that hampers the narrative--it is Houellebecq's touted scientific theorizing, which, far from covering fresh ground, resorts to the shibboleths of popular science. Houellebecq is disgusted with liberal society, but his self-importance and humorlessness overwhelm his characters and finally will tax readers' patience. 40,000 first printing. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A literary sensation in France that has already been translated into 22 languages, this novel stars two disparate brothers (same hip Sixties mother but different fathers). The sexually obsessed Bruno is a literary genius manqu?, while Michel is a misanthropic biologist who would like to purge humans of their uncontrollable appetites.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
116 of 125 people found the following review helpful.
Woah. not for everyone. FOR ME.
By Campbell Roark
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!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Desperately Needs Redemption
By hotbiscuitsandsweetmarie
Monsieur Houellebecq, in his book, The Elementary Particles, demonstrates the severity of the harm done to human society by the sexual revolution of the 20th century. He seems to see this as a one-time occurrence, choosing to ignore the sexual promiscuity and idolatry going back to ancient times. As Solomon wrote more than once, "There is nothing new under the sun." Other thinkers have described history as a pendulum which swings from extreme licentiousness in one era to extreme prudishness in another. Houellebecq seems not to recognize this as a pattern. Of course, even if he did, it is merely descriptive of what has taken place, offering no solution to either extreme. One extreme is nearly as misguided as the other.
An obvious problem with this book for me is the use of titillating and usually repulsive sex scenes as a tool to demonstrate the depth of individual and societal depravity. It feels a bit like being assaulted with words. It does serve to make his point, but I'm not persuaded it is the best way to do so.
It interests me that Houellebecq regards Christianity as having no hope to offer to the victims of the sexual revolution. He does not regard Christianity as merely unpopular or outdated, but as a philosophy which has been completely discredited. Many people exist as living proof that Christianity is true, but the author omitted everyone like that from his book. This may be caused by either an appalling ignorance on his part or a kind of intellectual dishonesty that refuses to consider all of the evidence. Even though Houellebecq criticizes materialism, his failure to consider the origin of the universe shows him to be a true materialist at heart.
I was glad that at the end of the book the author attempted to find a way to redeem humanity. However, even if science is ever able to clone creatures that do not biologically degrade prematurely, there is no reason to assume that cloning would alter human nature. Neither greater awareness of interdependence nor a greater feeling of community will necessarily decrease the tendency toward selfishness. Love itself, in my opinion, would actually be diminished if cloning became the main method of procreation. In my own life, I can see that what I love most in my family and my friends are the traits that make them unique, the ones that feel foreign to me. When I see my faults in others, I dislike them at least as much as I dislike them in myself, if not more. I suspect that I would cherish my clone much less than my child. As evidence, I should point out that I am much more exacting and harsh in regard to my own failings than I am toward anyone else's.
Without intending to, Monsieur Houellebecq demonstrates some Biblical principles. His characters, and indeed his entire Earth, are living out Romans 1:24-25. "Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen." Yet when they see that their lifestyle leads to sorrow and alienation rather than pleasure and love, they stubbornly cling to their belief that youth and beauty are the most valuable human traits. Rather than turning their backs on their sexual addiction and committing fully to each other, Christiane and Bruno continue throwing themselves on the orgiastic pyre as they toy with maybe loving each other a little bit for a while. The solutions chosen by all of the characters are thoroughly depressing: Christiane and Annabelle both choose suicide rather than dependency and illness. Michel chooses first isolation, then workaholism, and finally premature death. Bruno, worst of all, retreats into the safety of mental illness and institutionalization, medicating his needs out of existence. All of this despair demonstrates Romans 8:19-22, "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now." In a rational universe, does it not stand to reason that if suffering is real, there must also be a real solution? Yet Houellebecq only offers to divorce us from our families, making the problem of loneliness greater than ever. He rejects outright the blinding glimpse of the truth of Romans 1:19-21, "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened." If there is indeed a Creator, and nature clearly demonstrates that there is, he must be the one who can set the world to rights.
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
A celebration to current humanity that eliminated death
By Bernard M. Patten
The prologue explains what the book is about and the epilogue confirms it: It is a celebration of current humanity (circa 2050) that had enough sense to genetically engineer itself out of existence and to leave in its place an all female, genetically enhanced, immortal, asexual, superspecies. The scientific foundation for this startling transformation came from Michel, one of the two half brothers who are the central, though uninteresting, unsympathetic, pathetic, characters of the book. I almost wrote novel, which would have been wrong. It is not a novel in the sense of a story with a beginning, middle, and end, rising action, conflicts that are resolved etc. Instead, it is more like a research report on the history of the biological revolution that abolished death. It may not be a novel, but it is literature, a new type of literature packed with ideas and imagination and accurately describilng a certain set of contemporary French people who are truly pitiable. Elementary particles has been a best seller in France and has been the biggest literary sensation there since Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse. Defects: the sex is mechanical and tired, the look at modern society too harsh, and the plot too crammed with whatever Houellebecq had researched. The main defect is the main asset, Dostoevsky's invariable flaw, tendentiousness, for that is what has provoked the controversies. Contrasted with the realities of modern life, however, in these dog days, the story is as tame as a holiday postcard. Read it to get a feeling for the current ennui that afflicts the French, whose same problems are also spelled out in detail and with pretty much the same estrogenized solution by Valery Giscard d'Estaiang, former President of the Republic, in his essay entitled Les Francais, reflexions sur le destin d'un peuple.
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