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In 1998, a French novel created a firestorm of controversy and provoked unheard-of sales in Europe. Written by a virtually unknown 40-year-old computer technician and former mental patient named Michel Houellebecq, Les particles élementaires made a stinging indictment of contemporary Western society through its use of explicit sex, lengthy philosophical ruminations, and corrosive black humor. Now, in its much anticipated English translation, The Elementary Particles appears on these shores.
Houellebecq's book chronicles the fates of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, whose lives intertwine with each other and with the events of the late 20th century. Withdrawn and unemotional, Michel conducts cutting-edge genetic research while coldly pondering human frailty. Bruno's compulsive sexual appetites are matched only by his stunning romantic failures, which eventually drive him into an asylum. Together, they represent polar extremes of human existence -- hyper-rationality and hyper-sensualism -- revolving about each other like the subatomic building blocks of the book's title.
For Houellebecq, the so-called liberation movements of the 1960s have led inexorably toward "the suicide of the West." In upending Judeo-Christian morality and fragmenting the traditional family, and in preaching the absolute primacy of the individual, they have created a society in which consumption and the pursuit of transient pleasures -- sexual and material -- are everything. The quest for happiness has petered out in a sea of painkillers and television screens, in dead-end relationships and loveless copulation. Houellebecq's constant references to the behavior of various other species, from insects to apes, imply that humans are really not much different from animals. Society must operate under a strict "moral law" in order to control these Hobbesian tendencies, which manifest themselves in places like Bruno's boarding school, where the merciless tormenting by the other students would scar him for life.
Still, if the author's worldview seems unrelentingly pessimistic -- provoking outrage among the French clergy, humanists, and veterans of the 1968 student movement, among others -- Houellebecq can also be very funny, no more so than when poking fun at the cherished convictions of the New Age hippies with whom Michel and Bruno interact. Their attempts to live "closer to nature" are lampooned mercilessly; Houellebecq clearly believes that nature is something we should want to escape: It is arbitrary and violent, not fuzzy and warm.
Though world-weary to the core, The Elementary Particles concludes on a note of grudging admiration for the human animal, "this vile, unhappy race...tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome, and infinitely selfish, it was capable of extraordinary violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love." Houellebecq's unflinching examination of the millennial West should interest Americans, toward whom many of the book's observations might equally be directed.
From the Publisher
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.
Economist
This remarkable bestseller is France's biggest literary sensation since
Francoise Sagan, people are saying, since Albert Camus . . . The passing to
a new generation of the literary flame—albeit, in this case, a blowtorch.
Times Literary Supplement
Les Particules Elementaires is a novel on the grand scale. It is almost
Balzacian in its attention to detail, and dauntingly ambitious in its
determination to tackle 'big themes': the descent of the West into an orgy
of consumerism, the decline of Christianity, the potential of human cloning
and the destructive nature of the liberal values and sexual permissiveness
of the 1960's, which have, in the author's view, atomized society. But as
well as being a forcefull polemical tract, Les Particules is a cleverly
constructed kaleidescopic work of chronological shifts and leaps. It is
also, in places, a very funny book. For more than one reason, the author
Houellebecq most brings to mind is Celine; as in Journey to the End of the
Night, Houellebecq here interleaves pasages of despair and self-loathing
with episodes of tenderness and pathos . . . Unsettling, rich in ideas, Les
Particules elementaires is a novel which sets out to provoke and upset, and
yet does not try to outsmart its readers. Written in a strightforward style,
it has a confident, reassuring narrative sweep . . . Demands to be
read.
(French) Elle
The great novel of the end of the millenium.
Publishers Weekly
Houellebecq's controversial novel, which caused an uproar in France last year, finally reaches our shores. Whether it will make similar waves here remains to be seen, but its coolly didactic themes and schematic characterizations keep it from transcending faddish success. The story follows two half brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Cl ment. They have in common a minor Messalina of a mother, Janine Ceccaldi, who contributed most effectively to their upbringing by abandoning them--Bruno to his maternal grandmother, and Michel to Janine's second husband's mother. Bruno's is the harder life. Abused by fellow students at a boarding school, he grows into a perpetually horny adolescence, his sexual advances always rebuffed because he is ugly and devoid of personal charm. He spends the '70s and '80s exposing himself to young girls or masturbating. After his first marriage fails, he meets Christiane at an "alternative" vacation compound with a reputation for free love, and together they embark on a tawdry swingers' odyssey. Meanwhile, Michel (whose story is told in counterpoint) is so emotionally remote that he is unable to kiss his first girlfriend, the astonishingly beautiful Annabelle. In college, he loses sight of her and devotes himself to science, finally becoming a molecular biologist. Then, at 40, he meets Annabelle again. However, as Houellebecq puts it, "In the midst of the suicide of the West, it was clear that they had no chance." Once death cheats both Bruno and Michel of happiness, Michel develops the basis for eliminating sex by cloning humans. The novel is burdened throughout with Houellebecq's message, which equates sex with consumerism and ever darker fates. The writer also upholds the madonna-whore polarization, pigeonholing his female characters with tiresome predictability. Still, it isn't the ideology that hampers the narrative--it is Houellebecq's touted scientific theorizing, which, far from covering fresh ground, resorts to the shibboleths of popular science. Houellebecq is disgusted with liberal society, but his self-importance and humorlessness overwhelm his characters and finally will tax readers' patience. 40,000 first printing. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Library Journal
Houellebecq's second work of fiction (after Whatever) arrives with great fanfare, proclaimed as a great novel by critics abroad; the author even rated a feature in the New York Times Magazine. Indeed, the book is grand in its ambitions. At its heart are two half-brothers, Bruno Cl ment, an oversexed, sexist slob of a failed writer, and Michel Djerzinski, a brilliant but affectless scientist. Their mother, who has roots in Algeria, had the two boys in quick succession and then spun off into hippie heaven (this is the Sixties), the self-involved fathers aren't on the scene, and the boys, raised separately by different grandparents, have miserable childhoods. Houellebecq's condemnation of the consequences of Sixties-style liberation is acidulous and ferocious, and one can only nod agreement while reading; if these boys are any evidence, tie-dye was a catastrophe. Tough and direct, the documentary-like writing is complemented by brief scientific and philosophical passages that are fascinating in themselves but aren't well integrated and don't shed as much light as they might. Reading this work is thus not quite the intellectual feast it should have been. Important for literary collections but more problematic than the advance publicity would suggest. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/00.]--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Artforum -
Lee Smith
The book's intelligence is certainly critical, but it is also comprehensive and precise, which, together with its narrative force, is what makes The Elementary Particles a major achievement in contemporary fiction.
Tom LeClair
Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles is tedious up close and ugly from a distance. Why the novel was an enormous success in France and has been translated into twenty languages is a quantum mystery to me, because the book is soddenly lugubrious and utterly French in its circumstances.
Houellebecq follows the lives of two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, from birth to middle age. Shunted around by their hippie mother and absentee fathers, the boys grow up to be a frustrated libertine-writer who ends up in a mental institution and a frustrated ascetic-scientist who emigrates to Ireland and kills himself after several genetic breakthroughs. Though separated as youths, Bruno and Michel share as adults navel-gazing, vagina-peeping and frequent masturbation, all described with a technical writer's distant objectivity. In fact, the novel pretends to be a biography of Michel, as well as a primer of twentieth-century science, written by a scientist in 2079.
Unlike Mitchell, who wants Ghostwritten to be a quantum experiment, Houellebecq knows from the beginning how his book comes out and uses his science to "prove" a sociological thesis: that the sexual and political revolutions of the 1960s in France are responsible for every contemporary malaise Houellebecq can observe. He may well be right, but Bruno and Michel seem invented to demonstrate the author's point. Houellebecq's fictional system is Newtonian, closed and determined by its creator's conservative politics or, perhaps, personal misanthropy.
From Pascal to Celine and Sartre's Nausea, the French have a long tradition of disgust. To this, Houellebecq grafts Aldous Huxley futurism. At novel's end, Michel has discovered how to make all humans have the same genetic code and do away with the uniqueness that was "precisely the source of so much human unhappiness." I don't suggest that Houellebecq proposes Michel's solution to what Sartre called "dreadful" human freedom, but Michel's extreme measure indicates the author's degree of disgust with the conditions of present life or, perhaps, all human life.
In Ghostwritten, Mitchell's quantum scientist says "human consciousness collapses one lucky universe into being from all of the possible ones." The Elementary Particles is an unlucky universe. Fortunately, readers still have some freedom, can enter the consciousness of both authors. But still--despite quantum physics--only one at a time.
Kirkus Reviews
Houellebecq, who writes in French and lives in Dublin, offers a second try (after Whatever, 1999) that's said to be a hit abroad. Often pretentious—or flatfooted—it nevertheless holds the reader solidly with its guess about mankind's biological future.
What People Are Saying
Julian Barnes
A novel which hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbit.
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