Rating: 
Summary: Touches deep nerves
Review: This is a five star book IMO because:
1) it is tremendously engaging, and even it's 'flaws' and uneven flow just made it better. The sex scenes were unecessary, but hey, only weenies would complain about too many sex scenes. And they are funny.
2) the emotionally raw, completely uninhibited subject matter is... unforgettable, and even though this book has a reputation for being 'a blowtorch', Houllebecq is equally skilled at showing heart, and deep humanity. The description of Bruno's adolescence and the universal desire for human connection and genetic validation was deftly, masterfully handled. This book needed to be written, and Houllebecq had the balls to do it. People who call this book immature for dealing with such powerful emotional territory, or worse yet, those who dismiss this as adolescent banter need to take as long look in the mirror; maybe the book hit a little TOO close to home? Hmmm? This book is imminently compassionate in it's 'harsh cruelty'. It also makes the author out to be an interesting character. Can't wait to read Platform.
Rating: 
Summary: Amateurish Philosophy, Science Insights for 10-year olds...?
Review: The book has it all. Did you miss reading lots of pseudo-philosophical rant straight out of really, really bad sci-fi? Do not worry. The author will give you a good introduction. Want some Existential angst 50 years too late? How French of you! Micheal is ready to deliver. Death and devastation over and over and over again? Delivered with a refreshing sense of utter predictability? Mikey is on the case. Pornographic stylings of uncommon power and insight? Enthiusiastic Check!Did you know that while the Western Civilization was comitting suicide, somebody, somewhere was watching a peep-show? No?! Read the book now! Do not delay! The future is feminine and it wants you, too. By the way, I met Aspect once and I know all about the Bell theorem, I think I should be in the book as well. I have to keep repeating those magical words: I am first-rate, I am first-rate... One final thing, how do you give negative stars? Can somebody help? The emptiness! The emptiness...
Rating: 
Summary: Better read for its hopeful ideas, not its naughty bits
Review: I read this six months ago, and over this period I've kept thinking about this book. One reviewer suggests that you read not Camus but Cordwainer Smith instead--an apt comparison perhaps lost on the existentialist coffeehouse denizens. Like pseudonymous Smith, MH provides stimulating critiques of the status quo via rather overly complicated stories. While in science fiction, where Smith's relegated, such an exchange of thought for sometimes less assured fictional skill is an expected tradeoff for readers, it seems many who bristle at MH's rants against the "new boss same as the old boss" fall into an easy trap set up by an author all too eager to goad and provoke. I liked the novel of ideas underneath the posturing surface of sex, drugs, rock n'roll. I barely noticed any explicitness in the content--but as I'm the same age as MH, maybe we're unshockable--part of the author's point, no? Again, the distance of translation must be acknowledged--in French perhaps his prose slaps you harder? (3 1/2 stars in English, therefore...) What leaves an impression with me months later is the longing for transcendence that the novel conveys. In fact, the conclusion moved me greatly, and I'm about as sentimental as MH (or at least as he claims to be in his press kit). MH captures a contemporary yearning for fulfillment that many readers might flinch from--the lonely keyboardist being a figure all too familiar to online bibliophiles. I would have liked 90% of the novel to have focused upon the reformation of the world rather than only in the end chapter within which such interesting visions are locked. (Parts of the conclusion reminded me of the Fritjof Capra talkathon film "Mindwalk"--for all the pluses and minuses that brings--the philospohical dia/trialogue borrowed from Galileo for our New Age, and another French setting!) True, there'd be less lucrative raunch, but more nourishing content. The manifesto quality of this chapter shows in fact that MH's true skill might lie more in social criticism than fiction, but that's a genre that sells even worse, and is less likely to grab profiles in the NY Times Magazine--which is how I first heard of MH, after all! MH has lamented the effort put into his first novel, Whatever, when it failed to arouse the lumpenintellectualariat against the consumer cyber age all we amazonians admittedly enjoy. But I'd counter that the debates raised on this website show how much his critique rouses exactly the debate he'd earlier hoped for...
Rating:
Summary: An unflinching sucker punch.
Review: This is the best book I've read all year (still, it's only May- and hope springs eter... well, no, actually, not after reading this book, hope does not spring. It just lies there, with a neat little hole in its forehead). At times hilarious, and at time devestatingly poignant, The Elementary Particles is an angry denunciation of, well, just about everything- from the degeneration of decadence and libertine sexual values, to the violence and cruelty innate in nature and humanity, to the cult of youth and physical beauty, to the hope of ever finding lasting love or underlying meaning in the world... Beautifully written, with great twists and turns. The sex scenes are handled deftly, as are the myriad (and I mean myriad) analogies for the human condition taken from phyiscs, biology, quantum mechanics, chemistry... I don't know. Language fails me. I wanted to provide some ballast for the more negative reviews here. People are entitled to their opinions, but how anyone could not be moved by this book- I could almost hear Barber's adagio for air (yes, the one from Platoon) luminously echoing through many of the scenes. Like the book says, in its final lines, it is dedicated to mankind. I think it lives up to that ideal, and is a worthy monument and testament to humanity.
Rating: 
Summary: The greatest happiness of the greatest number?
Review: "Les Particules Elementaires" (or "The Elementary Particles" in English translation) is a dark, sardonic novel, which in many ways could be looked upon as the successor (if not quite the sequel) to "Extension du Domaine de la Lutte". Houellebecq uses the lives of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, to examine the condition of the individual in modern, liberal, free-market Western society. Bruno's private life has been a nightmare since his school days when he underwent brutal sexual abuse by other boys: his adult life has been characterised by obsession with, and frustration by, sex. Michel's life, on the other hand, is starkly different. He is a cold, isolated individual, more absorbed by his studies than by forming realtionships with other human beings. Michel and Bruno's lives are the damaged products, according to Houellebecq, of modern Western society, a society in which economic and social individualism is the dominant theme. The old inclusive values which knitted society together have been dispensed with. The fact that individuals are left to their own devices stips away their humanity, leaving them little better than animals - a sort of social Darwinism in economic, social and sexual terms. This is a deeply condemnatory and pessimistic novel. I can't speak for the English translation, but the original French version is often a chore to read: Houellebecq's style is frequently preachy - the sections of lighter prose (such as Bruno's time at the Lieu de Changement) are offset by far heavier sections. It is a condemnatory novel (beware if you were ever a hippy), and could be criticised for starting from a false assumption that individuals lived happier lives and society as a whole was better in the past: that the argument centred on the loss of religious values leading to a second fall from grace doesn't really stand up to close examination. But, it's still a worthwhile read (despite its faults) in that it really does make a case for challenging the assumption that the market-based, consumer-is-king society we've come to live in really is the best we can manage. Surely, the question is worth posing? G Rodgers
Rating:
Summary: Poignant social criticism and a moving book.
Review: This moving novel expresses my own repulsion (and that of many of my generation) toward the 60s 'hippie' movement and its catastrophic efforts to reengineer Western civilization. These efforts have been, to a large extent, successful and we will suffer the consequence for a long time. No less importantly, the book is excellently written. It transforms, perhaps even revolutionizes.
Rating:
Summary: Depressing, overdone, pretentious - overall? great
Review: Here are some things you should know about this book.
First of all, this book's mission is to convince you that humanity is an absurd, endlessly tragic farce and that everyone dies miserable and full of regret. Modern life (make no mistake about it, OUR modern life) is just the latest manifestation of humanity's cruelty towards itself and most people are either hideously evil professional victimizers or helpless, introverted perverts.
That being said, I'd like to focus on what "The Elementary Particles" is REALLY trying to say about society and people. This story is about two brothers who are as much products of their society as characters in their own right. But I think Bruno is, in a sense, the more important character. What does his experience tell us? According to the back cover of the book itself, Bruno is "a raucous, promiscuous hedonist and a failure at everything." In the book he is consistently portrayed as a vile character. But Houllebecq makes it difficult to overlook the horrors that shape him. He is violently sexually molested at a boy's school, he watches helplessly as his mother slowly goes insane, he grows up detested by girls. His life is one torment after another - he knows nothing except fear and powerlessness. So he grows up, through the 70s into the 80s and 90s, and becomes infintely cynical - devoid of compassion for anyone, compassion that he was denied. But what happens to Bruno just as he approaches his mid-life crisis - and what makes this book so undeniably beautiful - is that, without expecting it at all, he receives a chance at the love he's been denied his entire life. Why should this be haled as a particularly brilliant literary moment? Because through Christine, the woman he meets, Bruno opens up the goodness that, up until now, has never had a chance to breathe. Bruno represents all of those who see themselves as "more sinned against than sinning", all the bitter people in the world who feel cheated by life and society. They, like Bruno, live isolated and joyless lives, alienated by the world and without a place in it. Christine represents the crucial, healing and distinctly feminine power of love and what can happen when someone like Bruno is given the feeling that they do belong. Houllebecq's message is not new, but it is more important now than ever.
So - I certainly suggest you read this book. For all its flaws, it portrays a beautiful and ultimately hopeful vision for humanity. Few books have EVER been written that define their times so acutely and powerfully. What we have to decide is what that means for us.
Rating:
Summary: Rare genius at work here
Review: If a work of art can be considered as an arrow let loose into the sky; this arrow does not fall back to Earth. The Winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2002.
Rating:
Summary: A textbook on Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Review: Born in 1958, Michel Houellebecq was abandoned by his parents at the age of six, and brought up by his paternal grandmother; his half-sister was born in 1968; for six years he was a boarder at a school in Meaux; his grandmother died when he was 20; in 1980 he graduated as an agricultural engineer and also married; he had a son in 1981, and divorced in 1984; he then became depressed and had recurrent admissions to a psychiatric institution. His first published forays into literature were poems. He has undergone a hair transplant.
*
Having first read the novel, the above biographical information initially surprised me. But then, considering that the characters Michel and Bruno are far from whole or realistic individuals, it seemed right that they could be taken as fragments of, or vantages upon, Houellebecq's own self.
*
Related to this, and despite some appearances to the contrary, the entire novel is concerned with internal ideas, ones that reveal the nature of a consciousness, not the nature of the external world - to put it another way, when Houellebecq appears to be speaking about women, or biology, or large forces in twentieth century culture, he is at heart talking about himself. Of course, one can't be sure of Houellebecq's aims, but if a commentary upon the world was intended, then the book becomes a spectacular exemplar of a kind of narcissism, where the afflicted fails to distinguish his self from the world (the original Greek tale has Narcissus admiring his own reflection in a pool of water, but he does so not out of vanity - he mistakenly takes the image to be another young man).
*
The form of the book seems typical of what Northrop Frye terms an 'anatomy', or what Mikhail Bakhtin, David Musgrave and others call a 'Menippean Satire'. Northrop Frye's 'Anatomy of Criticism', and Bakhtin's 'Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics', explain this terminology, and then show how useful it can be for understanding the place of a seemingly 'unclassifiable' text within a living tradition - both of these books are very readable, with great insights into many works of literature, and are less difficult and theoretical than they might at first sound. In any case, if you read The Elementary Particles and then think of Gulliver's Travels, or Brave New World, or Gravity's Rainbow (to cite three other Menippean satires), it becomes clear that such books should not be asked to do what social realist novels do, that is provide vivid characters that develop, or a believable plot, and so on - their concerns lie elsewhere.
*
The word surface deserves comment. The book is amazingly readable; as readable, in fact, as pornography, or an airport novel - and it's probable that both these genres served as influences. So the prose races along, and the pages flip breezily by, but the price lies in very few sentences, or turns of phrase, being memorable. Still more unfortunately, I think the same applies to all the so-called 'great ideas' raised in the book. Numerous critics mention these ideas, but do not elaborate past saying that Houellebecq condemns the free-love culture of the Sixties (hardly a withering insight), or imagines a sexless immortal successor race (without any thought given to the ramifications of this). Again, I think the way to fathom the disappointment one feels in regards the author's ideas is to take them as primarily reflections of and upon his own damaged self, not the world.
*
Ultimately, I found The Elementary Particles good without being great. Houellebecq openly admires Bret Easton Ellis's writing, and I'd say his is on a par. If there exists a literary pantheon, then Michel Tournier (The Erl King, Gemini) seems superior, in terms of writing skill, intellectual insight, and breadth of view, and Thomas Bernhard (Extinction, et al) seems far more successful in turning a kind of madness into great art. Houellebecq, however, does creep ahead of those other unintentional narcissists, Wilbur Smith and Stephen King.
Rating: 
Summary: Sharp, but overambitious.
Review: "Elementary Particles" is the story of two half-brothers, Michel the geneticist, and Bruno the hedonist. Michel spends his life seeking a major discovery about genetics, while Bruno spends his life seeking a major discovery about life. We learn both brothers were all but abandoned by their selfish 1960s hippie mother, and both are struggling with their lives due to the trauma of their early memories of her. They are both atomized particles, adrift in the universe. Bruno spends time at nudist settings and a 1960s-style cult colony, trying to learn as much about the experiences of life as possible, but spending more time with himself than with others. Michel throws himself into his work, trying to learn about the nature of life as possible. The two brothers are essentially players in a drama attempting to explore the classic "nature versus nurture" arguments of classical and contemporary philosophy and science, i.e., do our genes make us what we are, or does our upbringing? Both brothers fall in love with women and attempt to stabilize their lives, but encounter tragedy within their relationships, some of it caused by the random chance of life, some of it caused by their inability to interact well with others, perhaps due to their chaotic childhoods. Far from escaping their past, their lives increase in entropy. Houellebeq uses the 1960s as an example of bad social structures, and uses genetics as a way of seeking basic notions of life, and whether sex/genetics has a role to play in love. Ultimately, Houellebeq will use these bases to explore the meaning of humanity and life itself. The book is nothing if not ambitious. The first half of the book is a raucous success. The author observes the narcissistic side of the 1960s with great insight, and discusses some interesting aspects of genetics, these two elements being his contenders in the fight of nature versus nurture. The second half of the book is mixed. Houellebeq attempts to show his two main characters' struggles through their relationships with themselves and their mother, which generally succeeds, and also through their relationships with women, with less success. The relationships with the women seem a bit contrived. The ending of the book was quite frankly a sharp left turn into uncharted waters, and left this reviewer very confused, almost browbeaten into accepting a conclusion that seemed detached from the rest of the narrative. His idea for the book is brilliant, but we cannot say he communicates it well.
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