Product Description
An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel–part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence.

Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist wholly immersed in the solitude of his work. Each is ultimately offered a final chance at genuine love, and what unfolds is a brilliantly caustic and unpredictable tale.

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

Amazon.com Review
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

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 88 reviews)

A Bizarre Book

This is one of the weirdest and most unsettling books I have ever read.
Some people will find it highly offensive while others may love its sexual
candour. I liked reading this book but there was one plot line which
really scared and disturbed me. I could not read this book again.
Once was enough. I found the ending to be ridiculous and absolutely
off the wall.

John
June 11, 2008

Yawn

Who really cares. Put this one day after a laborious try 1/3rd into it. Maybe it was a bad translation.
May 25, 2008

Just not a strong novel

Well, it seems there is hardly any point in contributing an other review here, when there are 88 reviews already on the site, and when so many people think "The Elementary Particles" is a "powerful," "unflinching" book.

I think it's weak: weaker than all of the models that the author attempts to emulate.

If you want genuine existential disorientation, read Sartre.
If you want intransigent, pithecoid hatred of the human condition, read Celine.
If you want a book that actually doesn't flinch in regarding death, try "Everyman."
If you want a protracted imaginative ventroliquism of motionless despair (like Michel's in this book), read "The Unnameable."
If you want raw, repetitive, compulsive, unsatisfying sexual excess, read de Sade. (Or Cathy Acker.)
If you want the thrill of a science-fiction ending in which humans are regarded as wonderful but primitive things of a happily discarded past, watch "Star Trek."

This is a pastiche of those authors, along with pinches of Sollers, Camus, and Artaud. The philosophizing asides are replete with clichés, and the supposedly astonishing scientific passages are clearly cobbled from popular magazines. If you find this novel shocking, you might consider just how immersed in the "endless middle classes" you really are: this kind of café existentialism is a trope of the middle class.

Houllebecq could write a strong novel, if he would allow himself to write the excoriating racist screeds that he attributes to one of his two principal characters. (A bet: I think he has written that kind of prose, but hasn't published it. Maybe he is also suffering from a bit of middle class timidity.)

January 28, 2008

A well written solid story.

As the author of The Second Virgin Birth, I must say that I truly enjoyed this book. The storyline of "The Elementary Particles" is really fairly simple: two half-brothers (one a sex-obsessed, self-loathing teacher, and the other a distant, emotionally detached scientist) find redemptive, middle-aged romance, lose it, and then meet their fates. However, there's a LOT going on in this book. While recounting the stories of half-brothers Bruno and Michel, the author bombards the reader with ideas; about science, sex, family, religion, philosophy, sociology and the human condition. Yet somehow the books remains an engaging and enjoyable read, never seeming dry or pretentious.
November 18, 2007

Add it to your philosophy texts

The story is as cold and detached as molecules in a lab. Houellebecq does in fact reduce man to elementary particles (hence the title), devoid of emotion and driven by base instincts (as is the case with one of the brothers in the story) or completely asexual and obsessed with the base particles that create life (as with the other brother).

It's an interesting read, if vulger at points, that depicts a world where science is the master. Not in the futuristic, genetically-engineered sense, but where man is obsessed with the bioligical essence of life, and driven by natural instincts. There is very little focus on or influence by emotion or religion.

The author uses the story of these two brothers to illustrate what he refers to as "metaphysical mutations" - those "capable of sweeping away economic and political systems and social hierarchies, even in strong, well-ordered societies." For example: Christianity was able to sweep the Roman Empire, and more recently, modern science has swept Christianity.

From the book: "When modern science appeared, Christianity was a complete, comprehensive system which explained both man and the universe; it was the basis for government, the inspiration for knowledge and art, the arbiter of war as of peace, and the power behind the production and distribution of wealth - none of which was sufficient to prevent its downfall."

It's definitely not a light read, but it makes you think.
March 25, 2007

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