PLATEFORME [Paperback]

Ce roman a le mérite de pointer les réalités auxquelles nous sommes confrontés depuis quelques années. L'auteur vise les agences de voyages destinées au tourisme sexuel.

Il aborde ce sujet de manière discutable. Il tient ouvertement un discours privé, surtout quand il reproche aux Chinoises d'être malpropres et aux «grosses» femmes arabes de s'envelopper dans des «torchons». Heureusement qu'une véritable histoire d'amour s'accroche à cet univers touristique qui profite de plus en plus de la perversité de certains touristes. Mais son héros n'en reste pas moins un homme blasé, qui fuit le spleen de la vie dans des activités à déconseiller.

Ce roman riche et vivant étale une vie occidentale peu enviable. Samuel Huntington vient de trouver une illustration de son Choc des cultures. On peut se questionner sur la pertinence de Plateforme quand on observe un peu partout des abus sexuels dont sont victimes les enfants.

This is my second time reading this book (the first time I read it in translation to English, and now I'm reading it in French) and it's just as good this time around. This novel tells the story of disaffected fortysomething Michel Renault, who loses his father at the beginning of the book (an interesting parallel with the story arc of Camus' "L'étranger," another work that portrays nihilsm and detachment from humanity; however, Camus' work is an artifact of the colonial era, and this work is arguably a post-colonialist work) and proceeds not to grieve. Feeling that he should take some time in which to rally a semblance of grief, Renault takes a vacation during his bereavement period off of work, and goes to Thailand, where he engages in sexual congress with prostitutes in an effort to relieve his angsty suffering. He finds this activity more satisfying in Thailand than at home on France. Here, however, he also meets Valérie, a travel industry worker, and falls in love for the first time. Rather than the love of a good woman redeeming Renault, it leads him to involve her in a scheme to promote sex tourism (euphemistically dubbed "friendly tourism") packages to European tourists incapable of connecting on a personal level in their home countries. This point of the plot shows how even in the post-colonial era, the colonial imagination still exists and is still capable of reducing other cultures as people to resources to be exploited. Renault and Valérie proceed to lose themselves in a cycle of promiscuous sex and swinging in an ultimately futile effort to connect meaningfully with others in France. Having decided that they prefer the pace of life in Thailand, Renault and Valérie then decide to relocate, but while they are there, they are confronted with the fact that the people they are endeavoring to exploit as sex workers are in fact human, and grow further attached to life in Thailand and its people and culture, which ends up being only one of several reasons why they couple cannot return to life in France. Houellebecq's voice for Renault starts out extremely detached and progresses throughout the story to engage itself more and more with other humans as his love affair with Valérie flourishes, but the shock experienced near the end makes him revert to nihilism, as his incapacity to connect with other humans re-asserts itself. Some critics and readers have maligned this book as being nihilistic for the sake of shocking readers, or even as a promotion of sex tourism, but a careful reading belies the critique of both of those things, as Renault is at his least sympathetic when he is attracted to these destructive elements, and his attraction to them is strongest after he experiences trauma, loss, and isolation from other humans and doesn't know how to cope. This book is strongly written, full of activity and details, and is a quick and entertaining read, as well as an interesting and thought-provoking polemic on how humans are capable of depersonalizing one another, and why we do it. Any potential readers should be advised that there is a lot of "strong" language and sexually explicit scenes; however, I don't find them gratuitous, as they are there to illustrate the particular predicament of an antisocial adult and his cohort.

In his novel "Platform", French writer Michel Houellebecq deals with themes that are dear to him. The contemporary man e his relation to sex, love and existence are at the center of the narrative that has globalization as its background. Actually what is behind the narrative is a little bit more complicated that just plain the world going global.

What Houellebecq wants to state is that sex and prostitution has acquired global dimension. People travel to find pleasure -- but not that plain pleasure of living their home. As the story exploits, men and women go to poor countries looking for finding new partners. It is an act so common in the contemporary world that an industry has been developed for it.

With his sharp prose, Houellebecq exploits the lives of a group of people bound by that industry. The main character is Michel a government employee who inherits a large sum and decide to take a travel to find pleasure. He meets Valerie, who works for a tourism agency. With her boss, she will move to another company and they will develop a new program of traveling. It becomes a huge success proving that there is market for that kind of tourism.

Houellebecq states the facts in a very matter-of-factly and assured fashion one wonders what kind of field research he went through to writer "Platform". Technicalities aside, this novel is pretty much close to his previous works, such as "Elementary Particles" and "Whatever". Sometimes we have the felling that the three novels are narrated by the same person. But is seems to be part of his literary project.

He is one of the most daring writers of the contemporary world. Heir to the French existentialism, he has some of the melancholy typical of Camus's novels. People who inhabit his world are sad and desperate. They search for a meaning for their boring lives. Most of them are not able to find it. At least so far. Although when that meaning can be found it is not certain that they can keep it.

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