Rating: 
Summary: An overrated must
Review: Michel Houllebecqs books are bundles of extremely confused emotions. The one recurring voice is the one of the lonely young man who is obsessed with sex - but usually can't manage to get a girl. In The Elementary Particles he is called Bruno, and his quest for the ultimate sexual kick makes up most of the book's narration. His half brother Michel is unable to enjoy sex or to feel love. He is a biologist who manages to lay the foundations of a new race of feminine creatures who are produced in laboratories and end up replacing the flawed humanity. (Actually this last bit is the one that shocked readers in Europe.) Houellebecq offers a disgusted and polemic view of our civilisation. Much of the time he seems to project his disgust with himself into the whole world. The voice of his books is the one of a hopeless romantic who adores motherly love - but who always ends up masturbating. He is obsessed with sex, he is appalled by this obsession - and consequently dreams up a world without any sex at all. It sounds a bit adolescent, doesn't it? Houellebecq is excellent at portraying the depressing details of loneliness and desolation, but as a thinker and a novelist he is so far below even Camus that I couldn't help feeling depressed at the intellectual level to which the most intellectually precise literature of the world has sunk. In spite of all this, I do not think that he can be dismissed as easily as that. At least he does try to think about questions which most people dare not even raise. In Europe you cannot go to a party without ending up discussing Houellebecq - and it is good to have him point out the loose ends of our culture which might end up strangling it.
Rating: 
Summary: wicked , accurate, literate, funny as all get down
Review: Houellebecq goes for throat. In a cultural landscape polluted with trivial blather elevated to the status of literature, the shock of reading an author with a real message hits one like an energy pulse. His most unpalatable thesis, from the soft center of the overripe intelligensia, is that many of the directions explored as liberating alternatives in the decades of the sixties and seventies, were poisonous seed crystals dropped into the historical flux. The narcissism and insidious narrowing of the self energised a relentless project of converting public life and public space into a hyper-aggressive marketplace. The aggressivity, insistence, and spiritual coldness of the petty demanding individual became the template modern life was erected on. For Houellebecq, the liberations into pleasure, the Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n'Roll of it all, as George Trow would put it, led directly to an autistic void that only the strongest, most refractory or creative could resist. For the *reste* , the pinkish brown mass of fleshapoids, life was to become an endless successions of inane spectacle, freeze dried fantasy, halfwit cults, new age phantasmagoria, cosmetic surgery, how to books, and a generalized liquification of the western project. All of which would be unbearable if he wasn't so horselaugh funny, but, he blessedly is. I never knew the decline of the west could be construed as stand up comedy, but it has been well served here. Most highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: I wouldn't like this book if it wasn't so damn real...
Review: Anyone who doesn't believe this book is a mirror held up to society is deluded. I have seen the characteristics of both Michel and Bruno in dozens of people I know. Sex obsessed mysoginists who have a history of sexual abuse are not that hard to find. Intelligent males who frequently discuss the physical limitations of women before "getting to know them" are under every rock in every city. The women in this book also display sociopathic sexual behavior so don't go ripping Houellebecq for being sexist. As far as the "graphic" nature of this book is concerned, an easily offended mind is a weak mind. The violence, isolation, and fear of AIDS discussed in this book is dead on. The very concept of love has pretty much been trashed in this society. Do you really believe that sexual promiscuity is the path to freedom? If you do, then you're probably some worthless sixties throwback who hasn't emerged from your drug haze. Mr. Houellebecq, thank you for welcoming us into the 21st century.
Rating:
Summary: Pathetic, pornographic, and profound...magnifique!
Review: When I read the shrill reviews from the uptight liberals at the New York Times, I knew this book had to be good. I was right. The Elementary Particles is the story of two half-brothers in post-1960s France. When their hippy mother runs off to a New Age community in California, the two boys are sent to live with different sets of grandparents. The boys grow up in a world infected by the ideas of the 1960s revolution. The highest values are American ones: radical individualism, sexual liberation, and self-expression. The bonds holding people together have been eroded as France is mercilessly (and tragically) Americanized. Every facet of life has been reduced to crude, radical competition. The law of the jungle prevails. The two brothers react to this sad new world in interesting ways. Bruno -- a teacher, failed writer, and chronic masturbator -- embarks on a life of endless searching for love but becomes obsessed with pornography, sex clubs, cyber sex, and nudist holiday camps; he molests one of his female students. Michel, a scientist, withdraws from the world, unable to love; he devotes all his time to biology and genetics research. Their superficially different reactions bely the fact that they suffer from the same modern disease which manifests itself in an inability to love, self-absorption, and an absence of meaningful social interactions. There is no larger community in this world; just a bunch of atomized human beings -- elementary particles -- that occasionally bump into one another for sex. They are adrift in a decadent West unaware of its own rapid decline. Bruno and Michel ultimately choose similar ways to deal with their sad fate. This book is a timely indictment of the social, sexual, economic, and technological upheavals in the West since the 1960s. This may help explain why Houellebecq has been so viciously denounced by the liberal and conservative establishment, not only in France but also in America. Speaking truth to power makes enemies. As a much-needed critique of a global society dominated by liberal, consumerist American values this is a very important work. But as a deconstruction of that society it is only the beginning. It is also entertaining and hilarious, if at times needlessly graphic. I recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: FASCINATIG WORK
Review: The major aftermath of the free love movement in 1960s France is the abandoned children that parents failed to raise. Two products of the flighty unions of the hippies are half-brothers Bruno Clement and Michel Djerinski. Their mother had no time to raise either child and their different fathers shared the commonality of never being around them. The two are separated as youths. However, in spite of some limited success by Bruno as a writer and Michel as a near Nobel Prize level scientist, both share common perversions as adults. Bruno and Michel worship navels and incessantly masturbate. They also flunk out in life as Bruno is institutionalized and Michel commits suicide. Readers will either recognize author Michel Houellebecq as the modern day Camus or just another biased individual blaming the world's woes on the extreme left. This reviewer remains divided about this work. At times the tale read like a powerful eulogy to mankind, but almost as often I felt like quitting without finishing the novel. The story line centers on a look back at the lives of the two siblings, especially that of Michel, throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Mr. Houellebecq takes aim at the hedonist side of the left swinging sixties, but fails to balance the picture with shots at the right me-first excessive eighties. This book is not intended for everyone as the novel is sexually depressingly descriptive and the lead characters even more disheartening. However, those readers who believe that death is the final leveler of humanity will want to read this well-written philosophically morbid maelstrom. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Not for Faint of Heart
Review: Here is a fresh look at the New Age Generation in France through vitriol colored classes. It is certain to make American critics angry, because it incinerates their politically correct and beloved literary sacred cows comfortably pampered in American stables, Mixing the oil and water of biology, physics and social scince with ruthless abandon, this is a straight-faced account of the trivilaization and degeneration of France's youth culture in the twilight years of the twentieth century. Here are the dregs and detritus of the rebellion wrought by France's revolting students in l968 in the gloom of the remains of post-war Existential "angst", a plague of AIDS and the misunderstood perils of DNA. As up to date as the human genome, this book is not a pleasant read by any means.But it is easy to understand why it set so many European intellecutals agog and has become just about the most hated novel of its generation in the smug,complaicent, self satisfied affluent USA circa 20001. It is a tocsin, not a lullaby, and Americans hate alarms. Grab it!
Rating: 
Summary: Best new book of 2000 (that I've read so far)
Review: I read about this book in the New York Times a couple of months ago and was lured by the shock value it supposedly offered. Although the sexual scenes can be a bit graphic at points (which I think is great...most writers don't have the ****), the book conveys a powerful message, that the decadence of the late 1960s is the reason our generation is so screwed up. I really liked Bruno, and felt intensely sorry for Michel, and for the reader to develop emotional attachments to the characters is a sign to me of an author's prowess.
Rating:
Summary: Incredibly powerful book
Review: I read the book as Les Particules Elementaires and found it to be extremely powerful. Houllebecq's story is unrelenting in its anatomical language and uncompromising view of life at the end of the 20th century. I highly recommend this book for those who would like the kind of perspective on humanity you will not see from Hollywood (except exceptionally, like Leaving Las Vegas) or CNN. It took a lot of courage to write this book and it should be read.
Rating:
Summary: Sweet suffering
Review: Houellebecq is telling us that "free" market, "free" love and "free" individuality are all an illusion. Sure, it's been said before, but not like this. Read it. Shake your head at the silly parts and give it a good think. As you read The Elementary Particles, you are reminded of so many French philosophical writers. He takes his personal experiences with absolute misery and frustration and carefully reworks them into a surreal parable in which every twist of the plot is pedantically underlined with a unifying world view. Just as the Marquis de Sade's sex crazed characters rave on for pages about atheism and Nature, Houellebecq's poor creations deliver speech after speech, sewing up Houellebecq's own enormous thesis. Houellebecq has no time for a clear plot or believable character development, but that's not suprising. He is trying to take on western civilization and he does an admirable job. As a writer, Houellebecq is an imitator, but in the novel, he makes mention of almost all of his ancestors, Sade, Celine, Camus, Sartre and even Kafka. As a thinker, he comes to the table heavily armed, and although he falters time and again, his second novel cannot be dismissed as cynical nonsense. Even more shocking than Houellebecq's novel is the fact that writers don't try this more often.
Rating:
Summary: The Novel as Prescription Drug
Review: I read this book because a newspaper review said it had managed to shock half of Europe, the only recent novel to pull off that stunt. I can see why - I got little pleasure out of reading it, but when I finished it I felt I was a better person in some ways, and who wants to read a medicinal novel? Well, we're all adults here and we do what's best for us even if it tastes bad, right? Of course not, and that's one of the points of The Elementary Particles, which draws a bead on modern despair and tells us flatly that there's no way out for humans. The book's two half-brothers, who genuinely want to connect and contribute on a very deep level, fail completely to do so - not because they're neurotic or atypical, but because they are just like everyone else, being born into a world that can't sustain them. That's the way Houellebecq pulls off one of his neatest tricks, making us sympathize with a couple of losers. Here's how it works: the narrator of The Elementary Particles is a member of a future species, created by humans from their own genetic material as a replacement for homo sapiens because they recognized that humanity had run out of ways to be happy. This narrator interrupts the story constantly with half- incomprehensible scientific digressions, rigorously eliminates any emotion in describing the state of the characters, and makes it clear that humanity is an inferior species. Despite all this, the new species admires people like the two main characters, just because they genuinely want to connect, they continue to seek love even when they know they won't get it. As for M. Houellebecq's talents as a writer - well, on the evidence of this book, he's bitter and cynical about modern life, not at all convinced that things can get better, thoroughly disgusted at human beings and their behavior, and utterly unable to take any system of thought seriously unless it arose before about 1955. I'm told this is a very French attitude - I have no way of knowing. Whatever the national origin of his mind-set, it explains why he's gotten so popular in Europe - everybody hates him. (Nothing like irritating the public to get its attention.) Apart from that, he ignores the usual storytelling virtues, such as a sympathetic lead character, a clear storyline and an ability to make the reader identify with the plot and theme. Anyone who can dump all those things and still move us has something going for him. So it's a miserable story told by a coldly analytical narrator about depressed and often pathetic people who, as a solution to their problems, embrace a course of action that most of us would find totally unacceptable, but it manages to be uplifting. By the time the thing was over I was a mass of contradictory emotions - about half sadness and half inspired hope, with a pinch of horror and a dash of intellectual interest. You don't ignore a story like that, however else you may react to it, especially with a closing line like "This book is dedicated to mankind." It's worth going through a little unpleasantness to reach that conclusion. Benshlomo says, Let's all grow up and take our medicine.
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