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Frank Wynne

Michel Houellebecq

The Elementary Particles Paperback – November 13, 2001

by Michel Houellebecq (Author), Frank Wynne (Translator)

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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.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

November 13, 2001
Dimensions

5.2 x 0.56 x 8.03 inches
ISBN-10

0375727019
ISBN-13

978-0375727016
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"An original work of art–ironic, intelligent and as airtight and elegant as a geometry proof."
--The New York Times Magazine

"[A] brilliant novel of ideas... [A] riveting novel by a deft, observant writer."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Fearless, vivid and astringently honest…surprisingly funny... [C]an permanently change how we view things that happened in our own lives. Not many novels can do that."
--Los Angeles Times

From the Inside Flap

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.

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Michel Houellebecq lives in Ireland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue
This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.
At the time of his disappearance, Michel Djerzinski was unanimously considered to be a first-rate biologist and a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize. His true significance, however, would not become apparent for some time.
In Djerzinski's time, philosophy was generally considered to be of no practical significance, to have been stripped of its purpose. Nevertheless, the values to which a majority subscribe at any given time determine society's economic and political structures and social mores.
Metaphysical mutations--that is to say radical, global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribe--are rare in the history of humanity. The rise of Christianity might be cited as an example.
Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it tends to move inexorably toward its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, aesthetic judgments and social hierarchies. No human agency can halt its progress--nothing except another metaphysical mutation.
It is a fallacy that such metaphysical mutations gain ground only in weakened or declining societies. When Christianity appeared, the Roman Empire was at the height of its powers: supremely organized, it dominated the known world; its technical and military prowess had no rival. Nonetheless, it had no chance. When modern science appeared, medieval Christianity was a complete, comprehensive system which explained both man and the universe; it was the basis for government, the inspiration for knowledge and art, the arbiter of war as of peace and the power behind the production and distribution of wealth--none of which was sufficient to prevent its downfall.
Michel Djerzinski was not the first nor even the principal architect of the third--and in many respects the most radical--paradigm shift, which opened up a new era in world history. But, as a result of certain extraordinary circmstances in his life, he was one of its most clear-sighted and deliberate engineers.

PART ONE
The Lost Kingdom
1
The first of July 1998 fell on a Wednesday, so although it was a little unusual, Djerzinski organized his farewell party for Tuesday evening. Bottles of champagne nestled among containers of frozen embryos in the large Brandt refrigerator usually filled with chemicals.
Four bottles for fifteen people was a little miserly, but the whole party was a sham. The motivations that brought them together were superficial; one careless word, one false glance, would break it up and send his colleagues scurrying for their cars. They stood around drinking in the white-tiled basement decorated only with a poster of the Lakes of Germany. Nobody had offered to take photos. A research student who had arrived earlier that year--a young man with a beard and a vapid expression--left after a few minutes, explaining that he had to pick up his car from the garage. A palpable sense of unease spread through the group. Soon the term would be over; some of them were going home to visit family, others on vacation. The sound of their voices snapped like twigs in the air. Shortly afterward, the party broke up.
By seven-thirty it was all over. Djerzinski walked across the parking lot with one of his colleagues. She had long black hair, very white skin and large breasts. Older than he was, she would inevitably take his position as head of the department. Most of her published papers were on the DAF3 gene in the fruit fly. She was unmarried.
When they reached his Toyota he offered his hand, smiling. (He had been preparing himself mentally for this for several seconds, remembering to smile.) Their palms brushed and they shook hands gently. Later, he decided the handshake lacked warmth; under the circumstances, they could have kissed each other on both cheeks like visiting dignitaries or people in show business.
After they said their goodbyes, he sat in his car for what seemed to him an unusually long five minutes. Why had she not driven off? Was she masturbating while listening to Brahms? Perhaps she was thinking about her career, her new responsibilities: if so, was she happy? At last her Golf pulled out of the lot; he was alone again. The weather had been magnificent all day, and it was still warm now. In the early weeks of summer everything seemed fixed, motionless, radiant, though already the days were getting shorter.
He felt privileged to have worked here, he thought as he pulled out into the street. When asked "Do you feel privileged to live in an area like Palaiseau?" sixty-three percent of respondents answered "Yes." This was hardly surprising: the buildings were low, interspersed with lawns. Several supermarkets were conveniently nearby. The phrase "quality of life" hardly seemed excessive for such a place.
The expressway back into Paris was deserted, and Djerzinski felt like a character in a science fiction film he'd seen at the university: the last man on earth after every other living thing had been wiped out. Something in the air evoked a dry apocalypse.
Djerzinski had lived on the rue Fr?micourt for ten years, during which he had grown accustomed to the quiet. In 1993 he had felt the need for a companion, something to welcome him home in the evening. He settled on a white canary. A fearful animal, it sang in the mornings though it never seemed happy. Could a canary be happy? Happiness is an intense, all-consuming feeling of joyous fulfillment akin to inebriation, rapture or ecstasy. The first time he took the canary out of its cage, the frightened creature shit on the sofa before flying back to the bars, desperate to find a way back in. He tried again a month later. This time the poor bird fell from an open window. Barely remembering to flutter its wings, it landed on a balcony five floors below on the building opposite. All Michel could do was wait for the woman who lived there to come home, and fervently hope that she didn't have a cat. It turned out that she was an editor at Vingt Ans and worked late; she lived alone. She didn't have a cat.
Michel recovered the bird after dark; it was trembling with cold and fear, huddled against the concrete wall. He occasionally saw the woman again when he took out the garbage. She would nod in greeting, and he would nod back. Something good had come of the accident--he had met one of his neighbors.
From his window he could see a dozen buildings--some three hundred apartments. When he came home in the evening, the canary would whistle and chirp for five or ten minutes. Michel would feed the bird and change the gravel in its cage. Tonight, however, silence greeted him. He crossed the room to the cage. The canary was dead, its cold white body lying on the gravel.
He ate a Monoprix TV dinner--monkfish in parsley sauce, from their Gourmet line--washed down with a mediocre Valdepe?as. After some hesitation, he put the bird's body into a plastic bag, which he topped off with a beer bottle, and dumped in the trash chute. What was he supposed to do--say mass?
He didn't know what was at the end of the chute. The opening was narrow (though large enough to take the canary). He dreamed that the chute opened onto vast garbage cans filled with old coffee filters, ravioli in tomato sauce and mangled genitalia. Huge worms, as big as the canary and armed with terrible beaks, would attack the body, tear off its feet, rip out its intestines, burst its eyeballs. He woke up trembling; it was only one o'clock. He swallowed three Xanax. So ended his first night of freedom.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Soft Cover edition (November 13, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375727019
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375727016
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.56 x 8.03 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #70,750 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23 in French Literature (Books)
- #1,211 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #4,988 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Frank Wynne
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Frank Wynne
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FRANK WYNNE has translated over fifty works from French and Spanish by authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Ahmadou Kourouma, Tomás González and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. In the course of his career, his translations have earned him the IMPAC Prize for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq (2002), the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2005), and he has twice been awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation in 2008 and most recently in 2016 for Harraga by Boualem Sansal. He is a two-time winner of the Premio Valle Inclán, for Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras (2012) and for The Blue Hour by Alonso Cueto (2014). His translations have been awarded the CWA International Dagger in three consecutive years. He has spent time as translator in residence at the Villa Gillet in Lyons and at the Santa Maddalena Foundation.
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Dio401

The Final Pattern?

Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2019

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When Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky examined the imagined consequences of the death of God, a certain grandeur attached to their endeavor. Residing in a world not yet devoid of certainty and standards, of rhythms and roles, they prophesied the proliferation of atheists pulsing with amoral energy, or saw an opening for the birth of a new man, superior by virtue of his freedom from the restraints of Christianity.

We who now live in that foretold world excuse the romantic elements in the visions of the existentialists. That they got the broad strokes right Houllecbecq regards as self-evident: The Elementary Particles passes over the death of God and the absence of an immortal soul or a divinely ordained morality as a novel of seafaring might the nature of water. But life, unromantic and tangible human life, is not experienced in broad and abstract strokes, but rather in the gaps between.

To live among the gaps is to live within the worldview which forms the background of each epoch of human life. For the West today this means to live with only negative certainty about questions of meaning and existence. The old answers to the big questions we can no longer believe and no new ones have shown themselves.

This state of affairs drives the characters of the novel to retreat into other forms of certainty. For Bruno it is the orgasm, for Michel it is his work and science; for almost every character it is a near complete selfishness and individualism. Instead of philosophical criminals and life affirming overmen we find beings confused and exhausted by a materialism both ineluctable and irredeemably feeble. Little retains its potency in our life among the gaps other than the certainty of death.

With death and dying, the negative certainties of our worldview seem to collapse. Approaching death we find an immaterial fog that cannot be fully lifted, and the question, posed by another drawer of our epoch’s conclusions, McCarthy’s Judge Holden, perplexes us still: “Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not?” We know the answer prescribed by the analytics of our worldview: death is extinction and its immateriality an illusion. That we remain perplexed speaks only to the reality of our limitations, not reality itself. But can a worldview satisfy in parts when it leaves us dissatisfied, devastatingly so, when confronted with its core?

My reading of Houllecbecq suggest his answer is no. Slowly his characters, and with them the modern West, are shown to have inherited existential broad strokes that make living between their gaps untenable. The tension of life among these gaps builds and builds, just as it would have for livers and breathers of the religious worldview as it was bombarded by science and the doubt it fostered. New frocks of transcendence, whether blood and nation or sects and ideologies, are tried and discarded. The defiance of past ways creates exhilarations that bloom and wither in ever shorter intervals.

These failings leave naught but tension, tension that fills in the gaps, covers them until there is no space left; until all possibilities have been exhausted; until a final pattern reveals itself with the closing of the last gap. And upon this new pattern the broad strokes of a new epoch are first made, incommensurable with the last.

But if religion collapsed under the weight of the scientific world, what hope is there when our hearts made secular can no more bear the findings of materialism than could the theology of the past? Might the distinction between the religious pattern and the secular be illusory? Our experience the closing of the gaps of a grander pattern, its contours formed by the collision of human heart and world? Might resolution of the last contradiction and slackening of humanity’s unbearable tension require the very hearts and minds that perceive them be left behind, filling in the final gaps of mankind’s final pattern?

28 people found this helpful

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Particles or Waves?

Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2012

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After reading The Map and the Territory (2010), I was determined to read more of the work of Michel Houellebecq. I chose The Elementary Particles (1998) because it was mentioned frequently in social media. I thought it would be as interesting and entertaining as his most recent novel. I was not disappointed.

The novel is a story of two half-brothers living in France, sharing a mother but fathered by two very different men. The family history is presented in a somewhat chaotic fashion in the first section of the book, "The Lost Kingdom." The descriptions of the family development of Bruno and Michel are brief and loosely connected leaving the reader unsure of the strength of influence of the blood relatives. The two brothers live separately as children and do not meet until later in the novel. The first section is good because it is difficult to find any sort of systematic influence of social/environmental variables that determine the different adult personalities of Bruno and Michel. Both are phlegmatic, but Bruno is a low-key, extroverted hedonist while Michel is an introverted social isolate.

The Lost Kingdom section sets the stage for the main theme of the novel that begins to be played out in section two, Strange Moments. Largely through conversations the brothers have in brotherly meetings, their past and current lives are chronicled. The illusion of cause and effect in the lives of individuals suggests that we are pre-determined by key events (quanta) in our lives that are elemental and irreversible. We have become "atomised." The extension of this assumption is that if we just think rationally about peak events, we can gain control of and freedom from them. Much of our thinking is `reductionistic' in the guise of insightful rumination: If only this had happened, If only I had done that. The problem the two brothers face is that there are no elementary particles of personal development, of thoughts or behaviors. When Bruno and Michel choose to focus on social variables from their pasts, they perceive patterns that they incorporate into their self-concepts. The consequences are for years, both miss the point of life, that elementary discrete particles of personality are actually inextricable components of social/cultural unfolding `waves.' Key factors are woven into a continuous fabric from birth to death with nothing left out or isolated except in a person's own mind.

In the third part, Emotional Infinity, Bruno, a secondary school teacher, keeps looking for the pleasurable factors that seem to be missing in his life as he obsessively seeks sexual activity and elusive pleasure. Michel, a biophysicist keeps looking for elementary physical particles that determine the ontology of the human being. Working on the implications of the scientific description of the human genome, he finds that even with cloning there is the possibility of mutations at the point of meiosis that are random when human sexuality takes its normal course. His idea is that sexual activity may be separated from human procreation, using a laboratory platform of meiosis that would eliminate the possibility of spontaneous mutation. This would reduce the human genome to set quanta. Sexuality then becomes a non-essential, free-flowing, continuous factor that can be used for part of a person's pleasure, while the manipulation of the human genome on a stable platform in the laboratory can be used for producing people who are free from certain diseases both mental and physical. This will not cause a revolution in human history but rather an evolution over a greatly extended time, as with all paradigm shifts.

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" was a phrase coined by social scientist, G. Stanley Hall. The fabric of life of the individual and the species is woven by continuous development in our total environment. The concepts of social isolation, dominant social stages, physical space, and infinitely small atomic and subatomic particles are delusions perpetuated by our desire for scientific answers. All of our subjective and scientific experiences in the world that we are conscious of or observe with instruments involve what Michel sees as an "interweaving" of all things. This is a comforting conclusion of continuity when we think of death as some sort of lonely event or qualitative gate to a better environment.

The Elementary Particles is a lovely novel that is a delusion in and of itself that I choose to perpetuate, as a persistent, continuous, false belief.

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LexTalionis

First half boring but sets stage for thought provoking and enlightening unravel.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2018

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Read a couple of novels in a week and then got 'stuck' on this for several weeks. I was not feeling the set up, the first half, the free-love critique (or rather just observation of). I nearly quit this book. I don't like quitting books. I really like Houellebcq as a writer although he could never truly be my favourite. He's brilliant and edgy and I perceive his writing as a little 'fractured'; almost like trying to picture the Mona Lisa using theoretical physics.

Anyway, I stuck through and just after the mid point it unveiled its mystique to me. If there is one thing that Houellebeq is a writer that is generally thought provoking. I had trudged through the mud, the crowds, the noise and the boredom and reached the show. I read the last half of the book in one night.

So as much as I struggled to get in to this book I knew, once I'd put it down that I'd gained more from it than the next few novels I would likely read.

Recommended.

Lu

Magnífico

Reviewed in Germany on September 18, 2014

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Estoy muy contento con la compra y con el servicio prestado por el vendedor y el mensajero. Todo en orden. Gracias

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daria

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 12, 2014

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Great quality, arrived on time.

Fulya

Doesn't worth reading

Reviewed in Germany on December 30, 2016

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I simply hated this book. The characters are so unreal, the sexual extremism is to much. If it wasn't part of our book club I would have certainly stopped reading after a few pages

One person found this helpful

ghostfinder

知識自慢がうるさい

Reviewed in Japan on June 28, 2018

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風俗面、シーモンキーとかフラワーチルドレンとか、そのあたりはうまく取り入れてるのかなという気がする
しかし得意げにちりばめられる科学知識などがほんとに表面的で、著者は理解しているのやらいないのやら…少なくとも、人物との結びつきは必然的とはいいがたく、こけおどしという印象を持った
この人の洞察力は本物ではない。私の嫌うタイプの作家。ただ、知識の羅列が派手なジョークという可能性もあるのかな。あと一作、読んでみたい

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The Elementary Particles Paperback – November 13, 2001

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