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Bruno and Michel are half-brothers, born to a hippie mother who believed in following her bliss. As boys they live in ignorance of each other--at one point attending the same school without knowing of their blood connection. As grown men they're not truly close, but they occasionally phone each other late at night. Bruno's a hopeless sexual obsessive, often drunk or on his way there, and Michel's a molecular biologist, distant and inaccessible.
Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles follows these brothers through the latter half of the 20th century. Bruno and Michel are buffeted by history, vessels of disappointment and desire rocked by the ocean of time. Shuttled away to a boarding school where he's sexually abused by other boys, Bruno grows up full of twisted sexual longings and a contempt for aging women so palpable that at times it's stomach-churning. At a commune in the country, Bruno takes stock:
The women were intolerable at breakfast, but by cocktail hour the mystical tarts were hopelessly vying with younger women once again. Death is the great leveler. On Wednesday afternoon he met Catherine, a fifty-year-old who had been a feminist of the old school. She was tanned, with dark curly hair; she must have been very attractive when she was twenty. Her breasts were still in good shape, he thought when he saw her by the pool, but she had a fat ass.Michel doesn't hate women; he doesn't even notice them. Instead of leering at bodies by the pool, he stares at particles in microscopes. He wins prizes for his experiments, but never experiences the rush of life. For both men, the damage has been done by history, by mother, before the story begins. What interests Houellebecq are the permutations and recapitulations of damage--the way the particles of the self can never be completely reconstituted. --Emily White --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Houellebecq's controversial novel, which caused an uproar in France last year, finally reaches our shores. Whether it will make similar waves here remains to be seen, but its coolly didactic themes and schematic characterizations keep it from transcending faddish success. The story follows two half brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Cl ment. They have in common a minor Messalina of a mother, Janine Ceccaldi, who contributed most effectively to their upbringing by abandoning them--Bruno to his maternal grandmother, and Michel to Janine's second husband's mother. Bruno's is the harder life. Abused by fellow students at a boarding school, he grows into a perpetually horny adolescence, his sexual advances always rebuffed because he is ugly and devoid of personal charm. He spends the '70s and '80s exposing himself to young girls or masturbating. After his first marriage fails, he meets Christiane at an "alternative" vacation compound with a reputation for free love, and together they embark on a tawdry swingers' odyssey. Meanwhile, Michel (whose story is told in counterpoint) is so emotionally remote that he is unable to kiss his first girlfriend, the astonishingly beautiful Annabelle. In college, he loses sight of her and devotes himself to science, finally becoming a molecular biologist. Then, at 40, he meets Annabelle again. However, as Houellebecq puts it, "In the midst of the suicide of the West, it was clear that they had no chance." Once death cheats both Bruno and Michel of happiness, Michel develops the basis for eliminating sex by cloning humans. The novel is burdened throughout with Houellebecq's message, which equates sex with consumerism and ever darker fates. The writer also upholds the madonna-whore polarization, pigeonholing his female characters with tiresome predictability. Still, it isn't the ideology that hampers the narrative--it is Houellebecq's touted scientific theorizing, which, far from covering fresh ground, resorts to the shibboleths of popular science. Houellebecq is disgusted with liberal society, but his self-importance and humorlessness overwhelm his characters and finally will tax readers' patience. 40,000 first printing. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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First Sentence
The first of July 1998 fell on a Wednesday, so although it was a little unusual, Djerzinski organized his farewell party for Tuesday evening. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
The first of July 1998 fell on a Wednesday, so although it was a little unusual, Djerzinski organized his farewell party for Tuesday evening. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Fantasy shrouded in fiction,
By Anthropology Professor (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Elementary Particles (Paperback)
This work caught my attention for numerous reasons. It is a contemporary novel addressing the various malaises of modernity, and at first glance seemed like an interesting character study of two individuals, half-brothers, as they navigate the challenges of an atomized and solitary existence. However, the plot unfolds according to what we might consider the rather standard expectations of two lonely and sad men, and the depiction of the world they inhabit owes equal parts to Huxley and to Sartre. The novel is pervaded by a deep sense of anomie and resignation. The prose itself, of overall high quality, is interspersed with graphic descriptions of revolting acts of violence and pornographic sexuality -- an indelicate device intended, I presume, as a traditionalist's indictment of the ideals of individual freedom run amok. The whole thing seems more-or-less held together by observations from, and indirect references to, the school of positive sociology, founded by Auguste Compte. However, it is not a novel of ideas, as one might expect, but rather an attempt to condemn the values of the Enlightenment as the root of all current human misery and unhappiness. Houellebecq would have us return to a Rousseuian world of mechanical solidarity or gemeinschaft, where personal responsibility and dense networks of social relationships apparently act as antidotes to the more egotistic and primal human urges and drives. It may indeed be news to him that such a pre-modern world is not so romantic as he believes. Be forewarned that this distopian novel masquerades as a work of fiction, but we eventually learn, rather late, that it is not. It is fantasy, and of the most cynical and pessimistic variety.
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).,
By RP Webster (Adelaide, South Australia Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Elementary Particles (Hardcover)
Well, not unequivocally fine. At first I wanted to launch this book across the room, like Camus chucked de Beaviour's "Second Sex," and dismiss it as rubbish. Then I wanted to proclaim it as a masterpiece, then chuck it, then laud it again. Like virtual particles adhering to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, so too were my emotions after absorbing this unbelievably sad existential tale. Borrowing heavily (probably a bit too heavily) from Camus, and totally ignoring the fact that two intellectual movements (structuralism and post-structuralism (maybe three:post-post-structuralism?)) have passed since existentialism gripped our world, Houllebecq writes eloquently about the individual's isolation, about mankind's miserable and perverted existence. Written with all the mysanthropy of a Gulliver tale, the author sees no escape for the individual except through death, no escape for mankind except extinction at the hands of an all female, genetically-enhanced, immortal, asexual, superspecies. As I said, he starts out basically replicating Camus's dismal take on mankind--the only difference being Houellebecq's baffling hang-up with basic sexuality. But I suppose that's the point. He's saying that in this day and age, after the sexual revolution, and the excessive permissiveness of the previous decades, sex is now no more than perversion for the sake of being perverse. Unlike the other reviewers who were offended by his supposed "right-wing attack on the left", I found it refreshing that he was rejecting "moral relativism" which personally I believe to be a negative force in society. His conclusion, though depressing and troubling, is logical. His style, at times profound, at other times fittingly textbook, was appropriate in its shifts and tones, but occasionally he could follow a strong passage with a jejune one. Example: "In cemetaries all across the world, the recently deceased continued to rot in their graves, slowly becoming skeletons"; followed by this goose egg, "All across the surface of the globe, a weary, exhausted humanity, filled with self-doubt and uncertain of its history, prepared itself as best it could to enter a new millennium." Despite this, the author ignites the readers sensibilities, and though the sex scenes could be a bit harsh and redundant, his point is driven home, with an ending borrowed from the radical feminist Valerie Solones: wipe out the men and we'll all be happy. To sum up: it's been done before, but never so cleverly. Houellebecq's probably never had coffee with Milan Kundera, but his ideas and style put him up among Kundera and the greats.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
fascinating way to portrait today's life in Europe,
By
This review is from: The Elementary Particles (Hardcover)
Monsieur Houllebecq clearly understands things that most people refuses to even see; the incredible way in which he describes today's life in Europe (and most parts of Western developed societies) trapped my intellect and transported me into France, the US and the UK with mixed feelings of "no way out", "fascination", "pleasure", "pain", etc... The way he "conects" characters with exact and social sciences is superb. Treatment of death as the ultimate result no matter what, perfect. His idea of loneliness as a consequence of superficiality, shocking. Definitely, a mirror in which not always you want to take a look; a great book from a very intelligent author.
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