Rating: 
Summary: Beyond Convential Nihilism
Review: If the true mark of a great work of literary art is the schizophrenic reaction of the reader to want to burn it one minute, then install it on the upper tier of their bookshelf the next, then The Elementary Particles is an astounding, I repeat, astounding accomplishment.Social anlyisis of late 20th century's moral and spirtual decay has never been fictionalized so vicously and so well, and it took several weeks for me to recover from the cloud of gloom it left in its wake. If there is comedy in the book, it is of a peculiar type of humour which leave one feeling guilty and sour after the chuckle. And while some have commented on the spark of idealism which inhabits the tale -- the two anti-heros eventually both finding a version of love they're capable of coping with -- I found no idealism whatsoever in the work. It is dark, unfriendly and intellectually briliant. Neither politically left or right, as it has often been labelled due to its scathing attack on hippies and New Agers, this book is unhealthy, brutal, but must be read. Good luck.
Rating:
Summary: bleak french genius
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Un revolution sexualle...
Review: Consider classical french prose, from Corneille, Proust, Camus, Sartre, Racine...consider then clasical political thought of French, from Rousseau to Derrida and Lacan... and you'll began to immerse yourself into a world that Houellbecq presents his deconstruction.
Humankind is disorted, humankind is dark and majestic, humankind doesen't have the natural right nor does it have its elementary justice for mere sake of being humane.... huminkind is filth, or so would you read between lines in this book... the saddest thing of all is, that those thought are true...
This is indeed a wonderfull book, one that can stand for modernism (ot as some would call it post-modernism), this book deconstructs every cultural thought, playing with stupidity and obscenity, creating paradoxes, and forcing you to believe that only they can be true...
You'll have a giant hole in your education if you skip this one...marvelous
Rating:
Summary: Not for the faint of heart or fans of escapist literature
Review: In this anything but escapist post-modern novel a dark view of the human condition reigns supreme (and is often supremely funny). If you look are made weary, curious, and perhaps a bit queasy by the modern world than MH is your kindred soul. EP (or Atomised across the Pond) pulls no punches and can often leave you with a deeply French existential after-taste--but if you are willing to not 'escape', to go deeper, this book is a very rare treat. A unique literary response to the Twentieth Century.
Rating:
Summary: Woah. not for everyone. FOR ME.
Review: 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!
Rating: 
Summary: Malaise
Review: While I enjoyed reading this book, I am, in retrospect, a bit unimpressed. The book has some fine ideas and the occasionally raucous observation that will cause the reader to burst out in laughter. In general, though, it seems poorly organized and portrays a postmodern perspective that is just a bit too decentralized and pessimistic to keep one genuinely engaged. As a friend observed, the book seems less a novel than a loosely-structured narrative that allows the author to espouse some of his ideas in a set of eccentric essays. These tend to be interesting but would probably be better formatted a la Montaigne. In considering all the various characters, you'll recognize at the end that not a one 'wins.' Every single character has ended up unhappy, dead, or in despair. Such is the author's prerogative but it conveys what may well be his primary intention: a reactionary longing for a world with fixed meanings and authority; a pre-revolutionary France where God and King rule side by side. Certainly a common, but naive, solution to a state of crisis. What makes the novel unique is its fusion of high ideas and base sexuality. Rarely does one encounter such juxtaposition; and while it is not truly appealing, it gives the book a certain freshness. I found the end to be almost a non-sequitir, a sort of sci-fi tag-on that seems out of place and somewhat ridiculous.
Rating:
Summary: Fiction at the Edge
Review: Every now and then, a novel comes along that reminds us that the novel does not have to be the genteel commodity that dominates bookstore shelves--sold like Martha Steward's towels and designed as well. Then a book like Houellebecq's Elementary Particles comes along and reminds us that the power of a work of art often resides in shaking us out of of our easy assumptions. It is, in short, not a Hollywood movie disguised as a book, not an easy read meant to be consumed in an airport, but a work of art.
Rating:
Summary: Not only a misanthrope's wet-dream-
Review: but also an engrossing, deft, (and most-importantly) WELL-WRITTEN book! The way Michel can slide so easily from character description to his sundry ruminations on humanity- he handles his ideas exceptionally well, whether you care for them or not. Also, this book is incredibly sad. I keep seeing people say how dark it is, but their is a vast amount of pathos in this to keep the spite alive. Rarely do i find books that are hard to put down, just my sensibilities. I loved this and truly did not want to part with the pages. 5 stars easily!
Rating: 
Summary: average
Review: Michel Houellebecq's novel of 1998 arrived on the scene to critical acclaim and controversy. That it was criticized by its detractors for being too nihilistic probably only made it seem even more important. Amidst the seemingly never-ending parade of little novels The Elementary Particles offered the promise of a heavyweight talent delivering a head-on critique of the way we live now. Unfortunately, the hype notwithstanding, it is not the Great Postmodern Novel.
Set in the last decades of the old century the story is of the lives of two half-brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clement, who were abandoned by their mother, a '60's free spirit, and raised separately by their grandparents. Michel becomes a successful scientific researcher but is an emotionally deadened man with no personal life. Bruno is an educational bureaucrat, occasional writer and heavy consumer of paid sex, although this diversion becomes less compelling once he hits 40 and his sex drive starts to flag. Each brother receives one last chance at love, but it all goes off the rails in a maximally bleak ending. Michel survives the wreckage to continue to work on a scientific breakthrough which paves the way for the replacement of humanity by a race of clones.
Houellebecq can certainly write sharply. Here is Michel at the beginning of the story disposing of his dead canary down the garbage chute: "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." This is a promising start. Michel's lab is next introduced by way of a digression about Nils Bohr's Institute of Physics which created an intellectual milieu of a level not seen since the days of the ancient Greeks. But: "Djerzinski had singularly failed to foster such an environment around him. The atmosphere in his research facility was like an office, no better, no worse."
The author serves up other zingers in his totally deadpan style, such as Bruno's acidulous undercutting of Brazil: an object of fascination for stupid Europeans; in reality "a [dump] full of morons obsessed with soccer and Formula One." Elsewhere Houellebecq compares the Duchesse de Guermantes and Snoop Dogg and remarks on the totally second-rate nature of literary success next to true movie or rock star celebrity. He also digs up Aristotle's hilarious notion that small women actually constitute a separate species. Bruno's passing encounter with his father at a massage parlour is likewise a classic example of brutal satire.
The strongest aspect of the novel is the depiction of the bleak and solitary character of modern life, the life of the Hegelian Last Man, for whom comfort and security are as omnipresent and dependable as meaningful human contact and a sense of purpose are lacking - a life of TV dinners, bureaucracy and anti-anxiety pills. Even the debauchery is antiseptic and depressing - middle-aged European civil servants having clinical group sex. If Houellebecq is saying something about modern life, however, he is certainly saying something about modern Europe, which is clearly the vanguard of demographic senescence and spiritual sclerosis. It would be hard to imagine this novel being written in the US or China, still less in wilder regions, such as Bruno's despised Brazil.
While this is all good as far as it goes, the problem is that it goes a little too far. Houellebecq simply goes overboard. The world he creates is monochromatically grey, the characters too flat and their lives too deadened to be interesting. The satire is brilliant when it is on target, but these moments are too few and far between. The author's occasional praise of the feminine or of Love are unconvincing and cloying. His digressions on how to fit love or consciousness into the materialistic framework of science - which appears to be a particularly French preoccupation - amount to nothing more than slinging buzzwords, which is in turn a habitual, albeit not exclusively, French vice. For all its influence in the world, science is rarely successfully incorporated into literary narratives. While a sprinkling of scientific jargon may give the impression that the author is an intellectual ready to tackle Big Ideas, the reality is that scientific concepts are generally of little relevance to immediate human experience, which is the subject matter of literature. The usual result of such efforts - even on the part of those authors who actually understand science at all - is an outpouring of weak or incomprehensible metaphors. The only interesting scientific observation in the book is when Michel notes that if atomic nuclei obeyed a planetary model atoms would have no well-defined chemical identities and chemistry as we know it would be impossible. But lines like "human consciousness could be compared to a field of probabilities in a Fock space" are just gibberish, although the author evidently intends for them to be taken seriously. Likewise the idea of a race of clones replacing humans and doing away with the messy problems of sex and social conflict is obviously weak. Michel is supposed to make some Einstein-like contribution to a genetic theory which allows the transformation of the human race. This is as bogus as it is vague. If it was intended to give the story or the character some greater significance it simply fails.
Overall, this is a well-written, readable novel (although the snippets of poetry in it are singularly flat, even though the author is a prize-winning poet; perhaps something is lost in translation). But it is not a major novel. Comparisons to the work of other celebrated "edgy" writers, Celine in particular, are generally not deserved.
Rating:
Summary: One truly spectacular book
Review: This is truly a spectacular book. As with some other reviewer, I found the book "un-put-down-able". The attacks that it received from both the left wing and right wing suggest that it indeed hit a nerve. While I found this much like his other books (Whatever, Platform, Tenerife), this book explores his ideas more deeply and more comprehensively. Despite being unashamedly about ideas, its characters are still very convincing. It is a good reflection of what modern life is all about and the author belongs to the same tradition of Camus.
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