Generally, in my humble view, one should read whatever Houellebecq produces. This one starts him off in fiction with observations on a bureaucratic death. It's a lot more than death by office of course. Houellebecq has lucid text which comes alive to take you like surgery to incisions on life. You can look inside at the blood and guts if you want. He loves his characters so much that he lets them tell you the truth. This can be quite painful at times. For example, his protagonist, if that is what he is rather than a subject, in madness and desperation, ends up hiding scissors so he will forget about cutting off his genitals. Some people will find it too confronting but I really liked it, especially the way he weaves in themes, such as how how everyone seems to so causally hate ugly people by ignoring them and dismissing their desires. It is a compellingly bleak work. It completely lacks any of the normal and comforting platitudes and so I almost gave it five stars. I would have but his fictional works get better and that's really a chronological issue I don't know how to deal with in the star system.

This is Houellebecq's first novel, which brought him to fame in France, then later in Britain and the US. It was published in 1994 but won the most important French literary prize in 2010. This seems strange, as by then he was quite famous--maybe a jumping on the bandwagon effect?

The other reviews describe the plot, such as it is, and there is n need to get into that here. Houellebecq doesn't seem to care about plot, one thing happens after another, it is all remorselessly depressing, and then he seems to throw in some attempted violence near the end, and then one thing happens after another all over again. I think one of the main themes of the novel is the "is this all there is" effect and his answer is, pitilessly, yes, this is all there is and it is pointless to look for any hope. It is this pitiless honesty that makes Houellebecq so absorbing. He puts his Everyman in an Everyman's situation but there is no arc, no redemption, no change. We are all caught up in "the struggle," a social Darwinist approach describing life as a struggle to gain the attention and felicitations--not love, forget love--of sexual objects we desire. It all, sort of, sorts itself out in the end, according to Houellebecq: we get the mates we "deserve" in the sexual econom. But until then it is terrifying because we always want someone more desirable than we are, so why should they want us, and even if they do, they will trade up at the first opportunity. So most of life is taken up with the day to day battles and manipulations to fend off rivals and to find some meaning in a meaningless universe. To find, in his examples, something better than masturbation or visits to prostitutes on the sexual front, and something better than meaningless work on the what-shall-I-do-with-my life front. We will probably not achieve what we'd like but the important thing is to struggle, not to abdicate, to keep looking for love despite the unlikeliness of finding it and despite the general hopelessness of it all.

In the evolutionary jungle of attractiveness, there are winners and losers starting at least by adolescence, the economy of "good looks" generally rules. We will not grow out of adolescent sexual failures but, rather, those failures create wounds that are deep and will get "deeper and deeper." Those wounds will create an atrocious unremitting bitterness that will grip our hearts. There will be no deliverance, no redemption, other than perhaps having struggled. In this sense, he seems a complete Existentialist.

He adds to this an interesting take on the "new" sexual economy, which may not be new at all. The victors, the attractive ones who have lots of sex in adolescence and young adulthood, by their very victory lose a kind of innocence and illusion they could only have if they weren't having sex all the time. As these people age, they necessarily lose their attractiveness. This leads to a festering hatred of youth culture, with all that remains being resentment, disgust, sickness and the anticipation of death. So, the victors aren't really victors. The sexual losers lose and this affects them throughout life. The sexual victors get lots of sex at first, but they lose in the end. There you have it. And who's to say its not so.

What to do when there is no hope? Well at least Houellebecq can write about it in terms that bring it home to us. And we respond to that because it is honest. Don't expect anything more, he tells us.

A good read, but now I'm going to burn this book and throw it's ashes in the river.

An amazing first effort. Houellebecq writes scenes and essays in this book that are unparallelled in world-historical literature. The monkey's discourse on capitalism and Robespierre to the Sanskrit stork, for instance, is a high point in the written word.

Unfortunately, Houellebecq's narrative suffers from a lack of focus and an abortive third act. This is a two act novel that has been written in three. Highly recommended, still. I'm sure others have gone on extensively about Houellebecq's discourses on boredom, work, sex, etc. No need for that here

A great novelist who captures the maladies of contemporary social life in a dark and stifling costume that rubs the more we wear it. Well worth the read, though not for one looking for simple answers. I found the ending poignantly uplifting, with the protagonist emerging phoenix-like from his depressive encounters with his former self.

Impeccable portrait of depressive anxiety or Something or Other. Maybe from living with cats. Getting that weird microbe in your brain cells that causes this type of perspective which I've shared off and on throughout my years. Mostly when I was younger. S

Awesome and funny tale.

A mention in some article about nihilism directed me to this book, and the "about" seemed promising.
Well, this is the wrong kind of nihilism.
Maybe I read too much of the Stoics recently, but the characters feel like unstable crybabies plagued by boredom and, as the original French name suggests, by the "extension of the domain of the struggle" into sexual sphere, the struggle in which they are losers. They see nothing (nihil?), and they are very unhappy about it. All thru the book. Sometimes they are sad, sometimes they lapse into fight-club-esque behavior, sometimes they are suicidal, but whatever they are, they are not any philosophical or intellectual - the book is all about emotions.
I derived nothing from this book, although it does make for a somewhat entertaining easy reading.