Rating: 
Summary: Undoubtably the best release of 2000!
Review: Monsieur Houellebecq is quite a brilliant writer who is a French Don Delillo and richard Powers who uses his scientific imagination (like Pynchon does) and melds it with a moralist's viewpoint. A rather contradictory figure, he is not fearful to attack and satirizes the excesses of our era which is mired in countercultural simplicities. His philosphical meditations are similar to those of Camus-lucid and sharp with a tinge of irony. However, more like Celine, this author knows how to satirize the foolish choices which most people delude themselves with and the general amorality of this commercial-cluttered era.This book uses a double and we are highly sympathetic to a rather initially replusive figure of the molecular biologist. However, we realize the downfall of Bruno and these two figures represent the dichotomy of human behavior and apparently Houellebecq wants to know that sexual liberation is a dead end and renders relationships meaningless in a Baullairdian context. I wouldn't be surprised that this author is Marxist in his attack on free markets in terms of the sexuality being analyzed and glamour is cut down like timber extremely quickly. This book is praiseworthy and provocative. I have never seen as good a book in the American market but I guess that a lot of our citizens aren't willing to admit their own shortcomings or hypocrisies.
Rating: 
Summary: philosophy with a porno touch
Review: if sexually explicit passages scare you, don't get this book. i mean, it's pretty graphic. but i'll tell you--I think the book exposes a lot of the realities of human nature and coexistence. and Houllebecq has the guts to openly criticize the individualization of society that accelerated after the 60s. ok, it's also kind of depressing. but hey, it makes you think like crazy. i strongly recommend it. and you have to love another french person bashing american influence.
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking
Review: This book is deeply engrossing and reads fairly quickly. Although the subject matter and writing style may be a bit advanced for the average American reader, those who are well-versed in the work of international authors should read this book. The book deals with some fairly esoteric issues (genetic determinism, evolutionary processes) in a fairy straightforward manner (mostly through the lives of two half brothers) until it reaches its scientific afterword.
Rating: 
Summary: Repulsive
Review: This is a vile book, a mere product of hype. M Houellebecq's views on humanity are repellent, and this book is nauseous. I hope that the English-speaking world will dismiss this book as so much hyperbolic garbage rather than give it the succes de scandale it received in France; it doesn't deserve any debate, since it is simply cheap and bad.
Rating:
Summary: Mothers! Give this to your sons!
Review: Houellebecq is quite simply the only popular contemporary writer who actually writes from the point of view of the aggrieved lower-middle class European. This in itself is enough to make him remarkable. But Houellebecq is also a destroyer and builder of ideologies, a wonderfully inconsistant thinker, and a sexual obsessive that may well make you think rethink the sexual revolution. Houellebecq is so many things that his literary peers are not. He is head and shoulders above the crowd, worthy not only of praise but perhaps of a real cult following. The Elementary Particles is a science-fiction lower-middle class male sex fantasy. That in alone should make you want to read it. Half of the men who read this book will immediately want to get married to avoid the fate of the two main protagonists. The other half will probably be inspired to visit prostitutes and engage in swinger parties, for the exact same reason. That is what is so great about this book: it can speak to people on a very intense personal level, but what it is actually saying is a bit unclear.
If it has been a long time since you read a book that actually made you rethink your own actions, this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Twilight of modernity: how to sociologize with a hammer!
Review: Houellebecq's novel, The Elementary Particles is a thorough critique of the foundations of modernity. These foundations are the elevation of science to religion status, consumerism in every-day life, and the rise of liberalism in the political sphere. Its story takes place in post-World War II France during the social developments usually referred to as "liberations" often associated with the hippie movement in the US of the 1960s, or the 1968 student rebellion in France (when bored French students and Sartre-reading intellectuals had nothing better to do with their time than to set cars on fire on the streets of Paris). It is the time when many "liberal" policies are implemented, such as divorce and right to an abortion.
The book starts by defining global meta-physical change, giving several examples one being the fall of the Roman Empire, and the rise of Christianity, another the decline of Christianity and its replacement by modern science. By science what is meant here is not only absent minded professors in white aprons looking for the cure for cancer, but more an institution and ideology around which society is founded, pervading all aspects of life; sociologists telling people that they should be happy because that is what surveys show, psychologists advising on all personal issues from childhood to adulthood. Natural intuition is relinquished into the hands of the experts. It is the world after this latter change that is described, a world in which for the masses there is consumerism, for those seeking something less shallow there is only (or at least mainly) science. In this brave new world people are alienated and lonely (they become Elementary Particles), even if opinion polls indicate that they should be satisfied, since everything is available at the supermarket. Houllebecq's description of the evolution of institutions such as family, marriage and community is worth noting: in the old times almost everyone got married or was part of some community, thus almost everyone had close to equal access to being loved. In Elementary Particles this essential condition is for most people lacking.
The story itself is the life of two such people; half-brothers Bruno and Michel. Their story really starts two generations ahead, describing how their grandparents, from peasant backgrounds in Corsica, noted by their schoolteacher for their intelligence, were encouraged to attend a better school. In modern terms, they made something of themselves (they managed to climb the social ladder). What is rarely noticed is that to a large extent they unknowingly sacrificed being part of their natural community (however faulty). The mother of Bruno and Michel is an even more severe example, here Houellebecq states that she was chosen to become part of the "liberal elite" (insinuating that climbing the social ladder is tied to criteria set down by political elites). As an adult she becomes a hippie for whom (and for her husbands) raising children turns out to be too much of a nuisance.
Thus Bruno and Michel are abandoned by their mother. Bruno grows up in an orphanage, Michel grows up secluded, with his grandmother. Through their eyes the reader also gets a description of what the influential popular media was feeding kids and adults at the time: psychologists giving advice on sex in teen magazines, the opening of sex cinemas, but also nature films on TV, etc. Michel watches animals eating and attacking other animals on TV (something like the Discovery channel), thus he is confronted with the natural brutality of the world. At the same time Bruno experiences some of this brutality for real, in the form of physical abuse by bullies at his orphanage (authority, even if justified, is in the process of disappearing). Thus, natural brutality and base human tendencies are not kept in check and balance by some community-building system of consensus, such as was done by Christianity for many centuries in the case of the Western World.
As an adult Bruno turns out to be an extreme example of a consumer (always seeking immediate self-satisfaction, of course mainly in sex), whereas Michel becomes a top-notch biologist incapable of expressing genuine emotion and uninterested in sex. Of course they are both seeking compensation for not being loved as they should have been when they were children. Both brothers suffer disastrous private lives, not to mention the people associated with them. The end conclusion of the book is a rather extreme (utopistic) scientific development by Michel, perhaps indicating that for now Houellebecq himself does not see a clear way out of the situation.
Houellebecq gives an interesting description of the evolution of modern science itself. While the development of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century is described as the work of many creative minds with brilliant ideas, he goes on to give the impression that science subsequently has become methodical and bureaucratic (business-like). A new employee in Michel's lab is described as one who knows everything about the gene F433 (and probably nothing about F434). It is also stated that after forty most scientists gradually become administrators and their genuine interest in science greatly diminishes.
To be precise the book is not anti-science in the sense in which creationists are, nor is it a call for superstition. It is critical of the institutions of science in that they have overstepped a boundary in their useful role, and have become counterproductive (perhaps a similar mistake to what the medieval clergy has done with Christianity in the time of Galileo).
It is an extremely thought-provoking book. It can never hurt to take critical roles of the trends of the age!
Rating:
Summary: Brave New World Updated
Review:
The central characters of "Les Particules Elementaires" (published in Britain as "Atomised") are two half-brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clement, born to the same mother by different fathers. Despite their family relationship they are quite different in personality. Michel, a molecular biologist, is a cold, rational intellectual, an almost sexless bachelor, with little time for love. Bruno, on the other hand is a divorcee, a highly-sexed libertine whose main obsession in life is the pursuit of casual sex with as many women as possible. He is originally a teacher, but suffers a nervous breakdown after sexually assaulting a pupil, and resigns his post to take up a position as a civil servant in the Education Ministry.
The book pursues the story of their lives from their birth in the fifties through to the early part of the twenty-first century. The author, however, was clearly aiming at something far more ambitious than a mere family saga. Michel Houellebecq uses the lives of these two ill-matched brothers to analyse the state of French and Western society in the second half of the twentieth century and the possible future of humanity.
Houellebecq's analysis is a bleak and pessimistic one. To describe modern society he borrows metaphors from science. We are living in an "atomised" society where individuals are reduced to "elementary particles". Social cohesion and loyalty to others have broken down to be replaced by selfishness and isolation. Love and the family have been replaced by the selfish pursuit of sexual gratification and traditional religion by inane "New Age" cults. A hedonistic obsession with youth and beauty stemming from the "sexual revolution" of the sixties, combined with the decline of religious belief, has given us a morbid horror of old age and death.
Midway through the book, Bruno and Michel discuss Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World". We may not yet have baby factories churning out Bokanovsky groups of Gamma-pluses or Epsilon-minus semi-morons (although recent developments in cloning and genetic engineering suggest that that may be a distinct possibility), but Houellebecq points out that many of Huxley's other predictions are coming true. The family has not yet been abolished, but its importance as an institution has declined since he wrote his novel Youth, beauty and sexual vigour are eulogised, improved contraception has led to a growth in promiscuous recreational sex dissociated from reproduction, psychoactive drugs (called Valium or Prozac rather than Soma) are increasingly used to control negative emotions, the increasing consumption of material goods is regarded as necessary for the economic good of society. "Atomised" can, in fact, be seen as an updating of Huxley's novel from the viewpoint of the late nineties.
There is, however, one important way, besides the absence of baby factories, in which our age differs from Huxley's imagined future. Huxley's "Brave New World" is the very opposite of an atomised society; it is a world in which "everyone belongs to everyone else", where the individual's sense of identity derives from his place in society and where social stability depends upon everyone knowing and accepting their place. Everyone, or almost everyone, seems to live in a permanent state of smug contentment; discontent is confined to a few intellectual misfits. In Houellebecq's view, angst-ridden unhappiness is the universal lot of late twentieth-century man. The novel ends with an ironic science-fiction postscript; Michel's scientific researches are used as the basis for a future in which human beings as we know them are replaced by a new species of human able to reproduce by cloning themselves. In this imagined future, humanity is too depressed and apathetic to do anything to prevent its own extinction, indeed, positively welcomes the prospect.
Houellebecq has been described as a reactionary, but I find this description inaccurate. What he is is a cynic. Reaction is a fundamentally optimistic philosophy; the reactionary believes that a return to traditional values is not only desirable but also possible, and that society will be greatly improved by this reversion from the status quo to the status quo ante. Others may strongly disagree with both his diagnosis and his prescribed remedy, but he himself is in no doubt that a cure is possible. The cynic, on the other hand, believes that the patient is terminally ill (to continue the medical analogy) and can prescribe no cure other than euthanasia.
There is a good deal to enjoy in this novel, including its satire and cynical black humour. Particularly striking were his accounts of Bruno's stay in a New Age commune complete with workshops on crystal healing and Siberian shamanism (New Age philosophies seem to be one of the author's betes noires) and of his visit, together with his mistress Christiane, to a nudist colony for the sexually liberated. Those easily offended by sexually explicit material would do well to avoid this book, although Houellebecq's descriptions of Bruno's desperate and joyless sexual encounters are far from erotic.
There is certainly room for disagreement with Houellebecq's view of society, and many of us may take a more optimistic view. (Neither religious faith nor romantic love, for example, is as dead today as he seems to assume). Nevertheless, as a novel of ideas, "Atomised" is provocative and stimulating. Its ambitious themes led the British writer Julian Barnes to say of it that it "hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits".
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: 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: 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.
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