Customer Reviews

The Elementary Particles

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

When I read the shrill reviews from the uptight liberals at the New York Times, I knew this book had to be good. I was right. The Elementary Particles is the story of two half-brothers in post-1960s France. When their hippy mother runs off to a New Age community in California, the two boys are sent to live with different sets of grandparents. The boys grow up in a world infected by the ideas of the 1960s revolution. The highest values are American ones: radical individualism, sexual liberation, and self-expression. The bonds holding people together have been eroded as France is mercilessly (and tragically) Americanized. Every facet of life has been reduced to crude, radical competition. The law of the jungle prevails. The two brothers react to this sad new world in interesting ways. Bruno -- a teacher, failed writer, and chronic masturbator -- embarks on a life of endless searching for love but becomes obsessed with pornography, sex clubs, cyber sex, and nudist holiday camps; he molests one of his female students. Michel, a scientist, withdraws from the world, unable to love; he devotes all his time to biology and genetics research. Their superficially different reactions bely the fact that they suffer from the same modern disease which manifests itself in an inability to love, self-absorption, and an absence of meaningful social interactions. There is no larger community in this world; just a bunch of atomized human beings -- elementary particles -- that occasionally bump into one another for sex. They are adrift in a decadent West unaware of its own rapid decline. Bruno and Michel ultimately choose similar ways to deal with their sad fate. This book is a timely indictment of the social, sexual, economic, and technological upheavals in the West since the 1960s. This may help explain why Houellebecq has been so viciously denounced by the liberal and conservative establishment, not only in France but also in America. Speaking truth to power makes enemies. As a much-needed critique of a global society dominated by liberal, consumerist American values this is a very important work. But as a deconstruction of that society it is only the beginning. It is also entertaining and hilarious, if at times needlessly graphic. I recommend it.

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!

I agree with the reviewer who said that reading this book was sort of like taking a particularly bitter pill. I sacrificed any chances of a good mood for the week I spent reading this book. I was haunted by the images of physical decay, moral corruption, and sexual perversity that Houellebecq so starkly portrays. The more I read, the clearer it became to me that most writers publishing in America don't dare to tackle big ideas. However flawed The Elementary Particles might be, the fact that Houellebecq confronts not only scientific progress and philosophical schools of thought, but also death, sickness, gender and sex in the most universal sense, shows such courage and vision that I can't help thinking this novel is genius. The glimmer of hope offered by the cryptic last pages ("the future is feminine") actually does lift away some of the bleakness, without taking away from the overall seriousness. Houellebecq also has a grim sense of humor that I enjoyed. I'm not surprised this hasn't received more attention in the U.S. I wish that weren't true. Maybe then American writers (or more precisely, American publishers) might find the courage to compete with this guy. The bar has been raised.

Houellebecq is telling us that "free" market, "free" love and "free" individuality are all an illusion. Sure, it's been said before, but not like this. Read it. Shake your head at the silly parts and give it a good think.

As you read The Elementary Particles, you are reminded of so many French philosophical writers. He takes his personal experiences with absolute misery and frustration and carefully reworks them into a surreal parable in which every twist of the plot is pedantically underlined with a unifying world view.

Just as the Marquis de Sade's sex crazed characters rave on for pages about atheism and Nature, Houellebecq's poor creations deliver speech after speech, sewing up Houellebecq's own enormous thesis. Houellebecq has no time for a clear plot or believable character development, but that's not suprising. He is trying to take on western civilization and he does an admirable job.

As a writer, Houellebecq is an imitator, but in the novel, he makes mention of almost all of his ancestors, Sade, Celine, Camus, Sartre and even Kafka. As a thinker, he comes to the table heavily armed, and although he falters time and again, his second novel cannot be dismissed as cynical nonsense. Even more shocking than Houellebecq's novel is the fact that writers don't try this more often.

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.

Michel Houllebecqs books are bundles of extremely confused emotions. The one recurring voice is the one of the lonely young man who is obsessed with sex - but usually can't manage to get a girl. In The Elementary Particles he is called Bruno, and his quest for the ultimate sexual kick makes up most of the book's narration. His half brother Michel is unable to enjoy sex or to feel love. He is a biologist who manages to lay the foundations of a new race of feminine creatures who are produced in laboratories and end up replacing the flawed humanity. (Actually this last bit is the one that shocked readers in Europe.)

Houellebecq offers a disgusted and polemic view of our civilisation. Much of the time he seems to project his disgust with himself into the whole world. The voice of his books is the one of a hopeless romantic who adores motherly love - but who always ends up masturbating. He is obsessed with sex, he is appalled by this obsession - and consequently dreams up a world without any sex at all. It sounds a bit adolescent, doesn't it? Houellebecq is excellent at portraying the depressing details of loneliness and desolation, but as a thinker and a novelist he is so far below even Camus that I couldn't help feeling depressed at the intellectual level to which the most intellectually precise literature of the world has sunk.

In spite of all this, I do not think that he can be dismissed as easily as that. At least he does try to think about questions which most people dare not even raise. In Europe you cannot go to a party without ending up discussing Houellebecq - and it is good to have him point out the loose ends of our culture which might end up strangling it.

Somehow almost all the reviewers on Amazon seem to have missed this book's greatest asset: humor. Granted, I read the original version and so can't comment on the translation, but come on, this book is outrageously funny! That it manages to be hilarious and depressing at the same time is, I'm starting to think, the "je ne sais quoi" that reviewers seem to have a hard time with. Maybe it's like the alcohol of books: a downer that somehow gets you up. Maybe the way that the shocking hilarity and forlorn seriousness are intertwined is what gives the book its resonance. It's schadenfreude and sympathy (or more correctly pathos) rolled together into a big stinky cigar -- and the schadenfreude part lasts only until you realize that as much as laughing at any one character, you are laughing at yourself. Maybe that's where depression sets in.... Elementary Particles is filled with a dirty, Gallic irony that can have your sides splitting and your lips sputtering even while you're feeling kind of sad and contemplative and you almost get upset thinking something along the lines of "Dammit this cynical, seriously negative son of a ____ has really got me going." If you don't get the humor, you're missing a lot from the book.


p.s. A quick google of "Houllebecq" and "hilarious" brought this up:

"The book has been translated into rather polite English, which is a pity. Only the informality of American language could convey the edge that makes Houellebecq's writing so remarkable, and so hilarious, in French." - Joan Juliet Buck, The Los Angeles Times

The central characters of "Les Particules Elementaires" (published in Britain as "Atomised") are two half-brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clement, born to the same mother by different fathers. Despite their family relationship they are quite different in personality. Michel, a molecular biologist, is a cold, rational intellectual, an almost sexless bachelor, with little time for love. Bruno, on the other hand is a divorcee, a highly-sexed libertine whose main obsession in life is the pursuit of casual sex with as many women as possible. He is originally a teacher, but suffers a nervous breakdown after sexually assaulting a pupil, and resigns his post to take up a position as a civil servant in the Education Ministry.

The book pursues the story of their lives from their birth in the fifties through to the early part of the twenty-first century. The author, however, was clearly aiming at something far more ambitious than a mere family saga. Michel Houellebecq uses the lives of these two ill-matched brothers to analyse the state of French and Western society in the second half of the twentieth century and the possible future of humanity.

Houellebecq's analysis is a bleak and pessimistic one. To describe modern society he borrows metaphors from science. We are living in an "atomised" society where individuals are reduced to "elementary particles". Social cohesion and loyalty to others have broken down to be replaced by selfishness and isolation. Love and the family have been replaced by the selfish pursuit of sexual gratification and traditional religion by inane "New Age" cults. A hedonistic obsession with youth and beauty stemming from the "sexual revolution" of the sixties, combined with the decline of religious belief, has given us a morbid horror of old age and death.

Midway through the book, Bruno and Michel discuss Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World". We may not yet have baby factories churning out Bokanovsky groups of Gamma-pluses or Epsilon-minus semi-morons (although recent developments in cloning and genetic engineering suggest that that may be a distinct possibility), but Houellebecq points out that many of Huxley's other predictions are coming true. The family has not yet been abolished, but its importance as an institution has declined since he wrote his novel Youth, beauty and sexual vigour are eulogised, improved contraception has led to a growth in promiscuous recreational sex dissociated from reproduction, psychoactive drugs (called Valium or Prozac rather than Soma) are increasingly used to control negative emotions, the increasing consumption of material goods is regarded as necessary for the economic good of society. "Atomised" can, in fact, be seen as an updating of Huxley's novel from the viewpoint of the late nineties.

There is, however, one important way, besides the absence of baby factories, in which our age differs from Huxley's imagined future. Huxley's "Brave New World" is the very opposite of an atomised society; it is a world in which "everyone belongs to everyone else", where the individual's sense of identity derives from his place in society and where social stability depends upon everyone knowing and accepting their place. Everyone, or almost everyone, seems to live in a permanent state of smug contentment; discontent is confined to a few intellectual misfits. In Houellebecq's view, angst-ridden unhappiness is the universal lot of late twentieth-century man. The novel ends with an ironic science-fiction postscript; Michel's scientific researches are used as the basis for a future in which human beings as we know them are replaced by a new species of human able to reproduce by cloning themselves. In this imagined future, humanity is too depressed and apathetic to do anything to prevent its own extinction, indeed, positively welcomes the prospect.

Houellebecq has been described as a reactionary, but I find this description inaccurate. What he is is a cynic. Reaction is a fundamentally optimistic philosophy; the reactionary believes that a return to traditional values is not only desirable but also possible, and that society will be greatly improved by this reversion from the status quo to the status quo ante. Others may strongly disagree with both his diagnosis and his prescribed remedy, but he himself is in no doubt that a cure is possible. The cynic, on the other hand, believes that the patient is terminally ill (to continue the medical analogy) and can prescribe no cure other than euthanasia.

There is a good deal to enjoy in this novel, including its satire and cynical black humour. Particularly striking were his accounts of Bruno's stay in a New Age commune complete with workshops on crystal healing and Siberian shamanism (New Age philosophies seem to be one of the author's betes noires) and of his visit, together with his mistress Christiane, to a nudist colony for the sexually liberated. Those easily offended by sexually explicit material would do well to avoid this book, although Houellebecq's descriptions of Bruno's desperate and joyless sexual encounters are far from erotic.

There is certainly room for disagreement with Houellebecq's view of society, and many of us may take a more optimistic view. (Neither religious faith nor romantic love, for example, is as dead today as he seems to assume). Nevertheless, as a novel of ideas, "Atomised" is provocative and stimulating. Its ambitious themes led the British writer Julian Barnes to say of it that it "hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits".

This is the best book I've read all year (still, it's only May- and hope springs eter... well, no, actually, not after reading this book, hope does not spring. It just lies there, with a neat little hole in its forehead). At times hilarious, and at time devestatingly poignant, The Elementary Particles is an angry denunciation of, well, just about everything- from the degeneration of decadence and libertine sexual values, to the violence and cruelty innate in nature and humanity, to the cult of youth and physical beauty, to the hope of ever finding lasting love or underlying meaning in the world...

Beautifully written, with great twists and turns. The sex scenes are handled deftly, as are the myriad (and I mean myriad) analogies for the human condition taken from phyiscs, biology, quantum mechanics, chemistry...

I don't know. Language fails me. I wanted to provide some ballast for the more negative reviews here. People are entitled to their opinions, but how anyone could not be moved by this book- I could almost hear Barber's adagio for air (yes, the one from Platoon) luminously echoing through many of the scenes.

Like the book says, in its final lines, it is dedicated to mankind. I think it lives up to that ideal, and is a worthy monument and testament to humanity.

I started reading this book almost a year ago and got through the first 2/3 very quickly; then something strange happened: I was so depressed by the contents of it, the constant pointless sex, the graphic descriptions, the callousness and emptiness of the characters and the emptiness of their shallow lives that--despite knowing that all this was deliberate by Houllebecq, that it was his razor-sharp deconstruction and commentary on the modern Western lifestyle--I was just not able to continue, until two days ago, when, with nothing else to do, I picked it up off my bookshelf and started from where I'd left off. The hiatus worked wonders and I whizzed through the remainder of the book, enthralled and riveted, although at times disgusted too, and full of admiration.

This is a difficult book but a necessary one and, I have no hesitation in now saying, a brilliant one. The book is full of some extraordinary ideas and incisive commentary on humanity in the late 20th century, especially that of European society. The ending--it goes into (very plausible) hard science fiction territory--the erudition of the writer, his eye for detail, and his twin obsessions of sex and violence, and his ability to be brave enough to write what he sees without any thought for political correctness or any of the other sops of the liberal left, is breathtaking and--despite the ocassional Islamophobia, nay contempt he portrays for organised religion but Islam in particular, his racism, makes this book essential reading especially after the tragic events of 9/11 and those in London on 7/7 and after. This book has more important and accurate things to say about the human condition of contemporary European man than any number of the dry academic essays on sociology and anthroplogy you can care to read. Understand Houllebecq and you understand what people nowadays really care about and think. I don't think I'd like the man but to ignore him and what he is saying would be to do so at our own peril. I haven't read a book full of such big and radical ideas for a long time.