Customer Reviews

Whatever

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Written in a dry, ascerbic tone, WHATEVER follows one man's downward spiral as he feels increasingly less conected with the world and society that surrounds him. The book deals with many questions regarding modern times, picking up the ball, as it were, where writers like Kafka left off. The paradox presented in this book is that with the increase in speed and circulation of information and communication tools, people seem to be overloaded and more isolated. At times the book meanders and one never gets really close to the other characters but it seems appropriate in a novel about the solipsistic nature of our times. A true pessimist, Michel Houellebecq does not allow his character to surrmount his seperation from other (or as Hawthorn would have said his "black veil"). The novel is well worth reading and I'll be interested to to read other works by Houellebecq.

I've read this little novella twice, both in fits of insomnia, while lamenting the loss of my girlfriend. The meaning is very clearly laid out, both by the narration, and by the occasional exposition of the narrator. Houellebecq's major thesis is that in the aftermath of the cold war, and the triumph of capitalism, the same cutthroat comepetition that has left behind so many economically has crept into social life to the extent that some get screwed, and others get screwed. Upon the first reading, the message was clear enough, but on the second reading, there emerges a subtlety to the narration that conveys the message far better than the expository rants that the narrator occasionally goes on.

So much for the book itself. I'm sure it merits a good five stars, but the translation is absolutely abhorent. At first glance, it's just the occasional creeping British argot, but you realize that the sentences are choppy, and that the argot is there just for its own sake. It is translated into nobody's vernacular. Hammond's rendition into a limp British slang is quite comical, especially since Houellebecq has been militating against Americanization (or at least you can feel that undertone) which the translator really undermines.

THe original tittle for this book is 'extension du domaine de la lutte' (extension of the struggle field) and in French it sounds exactly like one of those manifestos 70s terrorists like to publish in between bombings and assassinations. Maybe this is a simple warning from the author: I AM DANGEROUS!

Well Michel Houelebecq doesn't look too dangerous and his ideas are either a posture of pessimistic contempt or the work of a dangerous lunatic, probably both. Still EDDDLL is before all a great novel. If you're into the subversive discourse of the author on the loathsome nature of sexual freedom and the need to overcome it you should read its 2nd novel (and last years'tremendous best seller in France): les particules elementaires.

PS: a film adaptation of EDDDLL has just been releised in France.

"Extension du domaine de la lutte", so does the original title, shows an acute vision of life in its everyday details and a taste for cold logics that help Houellebecq explain how his life went THAT bad... (See "The elementary particles" for this parallel between "hard" science and life). His vision might seem absolutely ugly and repulsive at first glance, but since his narration is flawless you just can't refuse it, and -above all- his (cold but terrific) sense of humor makes the book readable... To me it is a "must", even better than the "Particles" (the decade's best-seller in France), which is less vivid and more complex in its structure...

I really enjoyed reading this book, despite its depressing subject matter. I could really relate to the character, and if lots of people feel this way, well then I don't feel so bad! At times it was laugh out loud funny, at other times it was like reading f---ing 'prozac nation'..but by the end of it it had that open-ended French intellectual feel that most contemporary novels just can't seem to get. A winner.

I rarely read modern literature. In a North American society that feeds off the latest recommendation of the pseudo-literary Queen, Oprah, I tend to avoid recent popular trends in writing. Oprah recommends and the drones run out to read her latest messiah recommendation. I guess it is good for sales. That's what sadly matters in the end, right?

I wonder what Houellebecq would say about Oprah and North American society's reading habits. (It is ironic in many ways to learn that Oprah has inspired many pseudo-memoirs - from 'A Million Little Pieces' to the recent holocaust 'memoir'. Victim of her own fame, I assume.)

'Whatever' begins with a series of short chapters. It is jolting at first, very superficial. The narrator is going to teach civil servants the use of a new computer system. What happens eventually is that he 'befriends' his colleague, a rather unattractive man in his late twenties, still a virgin, hopeless with women.

It took me about fifty pages to finally feel engaged with this novel. Whereas 'Platform' and 'The Elementary Particles' (highly recommended) had me from the first page, 'Whatever' took some time. After page 50, I began to see the emotional and psychological debacle going on in the narrator's life. The tone is set in the earlier stages of the book but the real emotional struggle begins mid-way through. The narrator is an atheist, a struggling individual. His pain is our pain, it's just that maybe we live life with more distractions.

Houellebecq is the most modern and competent literary author of our time. Some might compare him to Palaniuk but I find Palaniuk lacks the philosophy and depth of Houellebecq (Albert Camus once wrote that the main difference between American and French authors is that the former rarely study or find a philosophy to explore their work though).

This book is poignant, I found it startling how relevant his ideas are, his thoughts concerning our modern era. Especially when he ruminates on 'sexual capital' in Chapter 8 of Part II. What happens with the narrator and his unattractive colleague are quite telling.

If you are looking for the non-Disney version of life, the non-Oprah version, I recommend this book. The writing is direct, honest.

This book does what David Foster Wallace tried to do with his recent short story A Depressed Person (which is, despite the usual ponderous Wallace footnotes and other narrative quirks, a fine read nonetheless). It details a terrifying solipsism and depression. Plus, it's damn funny: the narrator, unnamed in Whatever, passes spare time writing animal stories that are highly moral (use of "m" word here not in the usual pejorative sense).

Houllebecq is great at skewering so-called "sexual liberation," showing as he does the fact that liberations of that sort lead only to hierarchies -- in the case of sex, there are the haves and have-nots, the pretty and the repulsive.

I can't wait for The Elementary Particles to be released in October.

Dismissed by some as a lightweight debut, this novel in fact serves as an excellent taster of the quite unique thought of Houellebeq. Most of the major themes addressed in his subsequent novels are given their first rumination here - the ennui of a generation of whose society has no more direction or meaning than that of their individual lives, and the belief that in such a society, where the basic needs of sexual love are more important than ever, such needs should be met by the kind of state regulation currently applied to help those 'losers' of the ruthlessness of the labour market. Houellebeq has the honesty to say that a person's sexual life matters as much to the average person's happiness as how many dollars or euros he comes home with in his weekly pay cheque. He also has the even greater honesty to admit that the average white male is not faring so well in the sexual market as he commonly does in the labour one.

'The extension of the domain of the struggle' (to give the book's french title) concerns his thesis that the sexual success of individuals is related to contingent facts relating to ones gender, class or race (ie. having a black body instead of a white one) just as much as one's economic success is based on similar contingent facts. And just as economics is a war between competing groups and individuals, so is sex, with historically white men preventing women having access to black men's bodies, and in modern times, through feminist cloaked legislation, older women increasingly denying men access to the bodies of young women.

Houellebeq's thesis is quite extraordinarily politically incorrect, sadly for him, even fewer are likely to take it seriously as neo-conservatism inevitably replaces the niahlistic anarchy of feminist political correctness as the western religion. Here however, as in his other novels, it is rather painfully beautiful to witness his characterisation of an aging white man's final acceptance of that reality.

We live in a world in which there are no more links. We're just particles. It's a simple metaphor.
-Michel Houellebecq

What could be sadder than someone who understands the greatest problem of modernity but has
surrendered to it, rather than struggle against it ? The novelist Michel Houellebecq is the most
controversial and reviled Frenchman of the day--and just think what it must take to achieve that rare
distinction : the most hated man in France (actually, he's even fled now, to Ireland). He was widely
hailed on the publication of this novel, which was famously compared to The Stranger of Albert
Camus by many, including the critic Tibor Fischer, who is blurbed on the cover of the book. But
then his next novel, published here as Elementary Particles, attacked the French student
revolutionaries of 1968, indicting them for their hedonistic individualism and the exalting of the
pursuit of personal gratification, which he writes has effectively drained sex of any passion or love.
Such things simply aren't done in France; the Generation of '68, like the perpetrators of the original
French Revolution, are sacrosanct, are beyond criticism.

Not content to merely rile up the intelligentsia, Houellebecq's new book, Plateforme, attacks Islam
and celebrates sexual tourism, trips to Southeast Asia for the purpose of having sex with teenage
prostitutes. The advocacy of using the Third World as a brothel upsets people for all the obvious
reasons. But his comments on Islam may earn him his own fatwa.

The girlfriend of the novel's protagonist is murdered in a terrorist bombing, prompting this passage :

Islam had shattered my life, and Islam was certainly something I could hate. In the days that
followed, I dedicated myself to hating Islam. Each time that I hear that a Palestinian terrorist, or a
Palestinian child, or a pregnant Palestinian woman has been shot in the Gaza Strip, I shiver with
enthusiasm at the thought that there is one less Muslim

Before September 11th such thoughts were truly beyond the pale, particularly in a nation, France,
which in a matter of decades will be majority Muslim.

In subsequent interviews, Mr. Houellebecq, possibly quite accurately, suggested that Islam is doomed
because capitalism is undermining it. A thought which reflects greater understanding of the roots of
fundamentalist terrorism than many of his more politically correct critics, but which is likewise not to
be discussed in polite company.

At any rate, in Whatever, a geeky young French computer technician, the job Houellebecq held when
he was writing it, who has not had sex in two years, is sent to Rouen with a partner, Tisserand, who is
even nerdier and a virgin to boot. The narrator resents a world in which he is unable to satisfy his
desires because :

In a perfectly liberal economic system, some people accumulate considerable fortunes; others
molder in unemployment and poverty. In a perfectly liberal sexual system, some people have a
varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.

So he tries to stoke Tisserand's own resentments enough to turn him into a serial killer (the one
murder of The Stranger apparently no longer sufficing).

Houellebecq's critique of modern man's isolation from his fellows is certainly accurate. However,
once you've diagnosed the pathology you can't just surrender to it. Further cheapening sex and adding
violence to it can only degrade mankind further. Having recognized our condition, and that it is
critical, it is incumbent on all of us to restore the connections that once bound us together, to rebuild
community, rather than to retreat further into the self.

Here's an excerpt from a profile of the author, by Emily Eakin, that ran in the New York Times
Magazine :

Initially, Houellebecq set out to change the world. ... Houellebecq believed the book [Whatever]
would force people to reconsider the premium we place on physical beauty. 'I was certain the
novel would provoke social change,' he said. 'Now I think it was megalomania. When you go into a
club today, you see the same behaviour as six years ago. A novel won't ever change the world.'

Is that really all that remains for Houellebecq, to try and get his hood waxed, and to help other
unattractive men to get it on too ? If so, isn't he part of the problem, rather than part of the solution
? When your doctor tells you that you're developing skin cancer, he doesn't recommend that you go
sit in the sun, does he ?

At one point, the narrator sees a graffito that says :

God wanted there to be inequality, not injustice.

This smacks of the truth. A world in which an unattractive, and by all accounts extremely unpleasant,
Frenchman does not have his choice of woman, while unfortunate for him, is probably inevitable.
But a world in which we are all mere particles, colliding randomly but never connecting, is a tragedy
for all of us.

The book then is most interesting as a self-portrait of a defeated victim of modernity's increasing
atomization (Atomisation was actually the British title of Elementary Particles). But, because he ends
up collaborating in the process, he is too much a willing victim for us to feel any real sympathy for
his plight. The appropriate posture towards the all too real phenomena he delineates is resistance, not
acquiescence. There is too much of Vichy in Michel Houellebecq.

GRADE : C

I must say that I read this book in the Italian translation, _Estensione del dominio della lotta_ (that is to say, a literal version of the original title). So, maybe I missed something (in my opinion, the language is very important).
In any case, how can critics and readers say that Houellebecq is a great writer? He seems to me only to be a pale, pathetic imitator of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. With a notable difference: Céline was a true cynic, a man with no morality at all, and his absolute perfidy succeeeds in reaching sublimity.
On the opposite side, Houellebecq seems to me only an awkward schoolboy, trying to represent sexual degradation and repulsiveness just like a preacher could do.
Psychiatric help requested (unless Houellebecq's girl-friend, Michelle Lévy, can do something better).
...