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Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : H : Houellebecq, Michel
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Michel Houellebecq's dark and disturbing novel Atomised sees him establish himself as a unique and important voice in European letters. With his first work, Whatever, Houellebecq had created a sassy, street-wise bulletin of disaffected existentialism, and here that voice brilliantly extends its range. Atomised (from the French Les Particules élémentaires) is the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, who seem to represent two sides of Houellebecq himself (there are more than a few moments in the book where we feel we are reading a strange roman à clef). Michel, a molecular biologist, finds ordinary, human emotions inexplicable, making him seem abstruse and cold. Bruno is his opposite: a frustrated libertine trapped in a body most find repellant but still holding sex up as his most validating moment. Through these skewed archetypes an intricate, sometimes quite moving story of the brothers' lives is formed.Houellebecq obviously has a formidable intellect and, like the best French writers, manages to rail against anthropology, psychoanalysis, New Age philosophy and modern society in general without losing sight of his narrative--indeed the narrative is controlled quite beautifully, the pacing excellent, the switching from one brother's story to the other's done with a quiet grace. While some of Houellebecq's views are at the least questionable, and while there are moments when the conclusions to be drawn from his broadsides are disturbing, this never negates the value of the work. This is an ambitious book in which Houellebecq asks important questions: if sex is continually degraded by its increasing commodification and, concomitantly, genetics increasingly offers us the opportunity for procreation without recourse to it, where does that leave us? How do we navigate ourselves, afloat as we are, in this new moral universe? What does the increasing pace of scientific change mean to the conversations non-scientists have about our lives? What place does something called spirituality, whatever that means, have in this brave, new world? This is a big, bold, clever book that has already achieved more than cult status in France. Houellebecq should be read, and read carefully, if not always believed. --Mark Thwaite
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Michel Houellebecq's book Whatever was a smash hit in his native France and has already gained him a cult following here. A funny, sometimes bitter, modern existentialist fable Whatever truly seems to capture the zeitgeist. Whilst his next novel Atomised showcases greater sophistication and is certainly more complex and reaching, Whatever remains a brisker, more distilled affair.Houellebecq's clarity of style is often remarked upon and the translation does a mostly decent job of conveying, in short chapters, in a fairly staccato book, his distaste for modern life. The narrator of the novel is young (just 30), well paid (computers!) and without a love life--not a geek, nor particularly a social inadequate, rather someone who just doesn't connect. He writes strange, allegorical animal stories; is a clumsy philosophical dilettante; and finds himself bored, overly self-aware and analytical, unable to settle and settle for his life. Then he is told to go on a extended work trip training provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system accompanied by the extremely ugly Raphael Tisserand. Throughout the novel, the cheapening of sex and intimate relationships through commodification and modern communication technology is contemplated, but the interrogation remains relatively uncommitted; the attacks on psychoanalysis come thick and fast, seem more personal and often find their target.
Houellebecq does do a good job here of exemplifying the cul-de-sac that bored intelligence often finds itself languishing in. The trouble with this as a stratagem for a novel is that the reader is in danger of caring as little for the book as the characters do for their lives; this tightrope is better walked by writers such as Beckett or even Brett Easton Ellis and navigated more successfully by Houellebecq himself in his next novel. Indeed in many ways Whatever seems like a dress rehearsal for Atomised with similar characters imbued with the same concerns, the same post nouvelle-philosophes ennui running throughout. But it is a dress rehearsal worth attending: there is more than enough clever writing here, with its mordant articulation of a very particular kind of modern unhappiness, to consider it a success. --Mark Thwaite
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Girls, girls, girls. And well-endowed boys. They're the subjects of Thomas Ruff Nudes, a book of photographs by a well-known German artist best known for his searching images of faces, night skies and architecture. The new photographs were pulled off Internet porn sites and enlarged, colored and blurred by the artist. The fascinating thing about these nudes is the way the indistinct tumble of imagery replicates the physical sensation of sex. Everything is hazy, incomplete, replete with longing--a giddy carnival of orifices and sex organs. Skin is suffused with the blush of sexual arousal. Women offer themselves to unseen men and to one another.In his painterly way, Ruff documents the elemental human urges that attract us to each other's flesh. The most interesting images in the book are the most abstract, revealing sexual appetite as the eternal pursuit of another body's knobs and holes. Accompanying the photographs is an earthy, supposedly fictional, fragment by the controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq. The narrator reminisces about the years when he and his wife visited sex clubs on the Riviera. He writes of "dark rooms where people make love without choosing partners, submerged in the flux of tactile sensation". This is the world of Ruff's most successful photographs, a place where the staginess of pornography is transformed into the realm of pure desire. --Cathy Curtis, Amazon.com
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