Michel Houellebecq

A new novel by the author of Whatever follows the lives and fortunes of Bruno and Marcel, born to a bohemian mother during the 1960s, who are brought up separately and pursue their own individual paths--as Bruno battles madness and sexual obsession and Michel, a molecular biologist, comes up with a unique way to express his disgust with the violence of humankind. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The Elementary Particles

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2020 A powerful criticism of modern life by one of the most provocative and prophetic writers of our age Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain's release of serotonin. When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return towhat they remember as a golden age. 'Despite its provocations, this is a novel of romantic and sorrowful ideas: Houellebecq as troubadour, singing lost loves' Rachel Kushner Michel Houellebecq has good claim to be the most interesting novelist of our times. . . Exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable' Evening Standard

Serotonin

A controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny new novel from France's most famous living literary figure. It's 2022. François is bored. He's a middle-aged lecturer at the New Sorbonne University and an expert on J. K. Huysmans, the famous nineteenth-century Decadent author. But François's own decadence is considerably smaller in scale. He sleeps with his students, eats microwave dinners, rereads Huysmans, queues up YouPorn. Meanwhile, it's election season. And although Francois feels "about as political as a bath towel," things are getting pretty interesting. In an alliance with the Socialists, France's new Islamic party sweeps to power. Islamic law comes into force. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and François is offered an irresistible academic advancement--on the condition that he convert to Islam. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker has said of Submission that "Houellebecq is not merely a satirist but--more unusually--a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind." Michel Houellebecq's new book may be satirical and melancholic, but it is also hilarious, a comic masterpiece by one of France's great novelists.

A Novel

Submission

Dans une France assez proche de la nôtre, un homme s'engage dans la carrière universitaire. Peu motivé par l'enseignement, il s'attend à une vie ennuyeuse mais calme, protégée des grands drames historiques. Cependant les forces en jeu dans le pays ont fissuré le système politique jusqu'à provoquer son effondrement. Cette implosion sans soubresauts, sans vraie révolution, se développe comme un mauvais rêve. Le talent de l'auteur, sa force visionnaire nous entraînent sur un terrain ambigu et glissant ; son regard sur notre civilisation vieillissante fait coexister dans ce roman les intuitions poétiques, les effets comiques, une mélancolie fataliste. Ce livre est une saisissante fable politique et morale. [4éme de couv.]

Soumission

Frank Wynne

A bureaucrat with a taste for pre-packaged goods, Michel Renault travels to Thailand where he begins to gain a taste for the exotic and sensual, an interest that draws him into an intense love affair with Valerie. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

Platform

A future world in which humankind as we know it has vanished is seen through the eyes of Daniel, a writer who has made a fortune with his comedies capturing the follies and foibles of humankind, and his subsequent clones. Reprint.

The Possibility of an Island

Cult novel about French Generation X. Book sold 40000 copies in France and won may prizes for the author who is a poet and father figure of new school of writing and literary magazine Perpendiculare.

Whatever

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections. Atomised tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is the dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls' magazines. A dissection of modern lives and loves. By turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.

Winner of the International Dublin Literary Award 2002

Atomised

If Jed Martin, the main character of this novel, was to tell you its story, he would perhaps begin by talking about a boiler breaking down, one 15th December. Or about his father, a well-known and committed architect, with whom he passed alone many a Christmas Eve. He would certainly recall Olga, a very pretty Russian he met at the start of his career, during the first exhibition of his photographs of Michelin road maps. This was before global success arrived with the series of 'professions', those portraits of personalities from all walks of life (including the writer Michel Houellebecq), captured at their work. He should also say how he helped inspector Jasselin to solve an atrocious crime, whose terrifying scene left a lasting mark on the police teams. At the end of his life he will find a certain serenity, and utter only murmurs. Art, money, love, the father-son relationship, death, work, and France turned into a tourist paradise are some of the themes of this novel, which is resolutely classical and openly modern.

The Map and the Territory

"Mes croyances sont limitées, mais elles sont violentes. Je crois à la possibilité du royaume restreint. Je crois à l’amour" écrivait récemment Michel Houellebecq. Le narrateur de Sérotonine approuverait sans réserve. Son récit traverse une France qui piétine ses traditions, banalise ses villes, détruit ses campagnes au bord de la révolte. Il raconte sa vie d’ingénieur agronome, son amitié pour un aristocrate agriculteur (un inoubliable personnage de roman – son double inversé), l’échec des idéaux de leur jeunesse, l’espoir peut-être insensé de retrouver une femme perdue. Ce roman sur les ravages d’un monde sans bonté, sans solidarité, aux mutations devenues incontrôlables, est aussi un roman sur le remords et le regret.

Sérotonine

Titre A Venir

Unterwerfung

Serotonina

En Las partículas elementales, Houellebecq lleva a sus últimas consecuencias su frase «Todas sociedad tiene sus puntos débiles, sus llagas. Meted el dedo en la llaga y apretad bien fuerte» La novela narra el improbable nudo que unirá los destinos de dos hermanastros: Michel, prestigioso investigador en biología, especie de monie científico que a los cuarenta años ha renunciado a su sexualidad y sólo pasea para ir hasta el supermercado; y Bruno, también cuarentón, profesor de literatura, obsesionado por el sexo, consumidor de pornografía, misógino, racista, un virtuoso del resentimiento. Encarnación consumada, en fin, de una sociedad en que la velocidad del placer no deja tiempo al nacimiento del deseo. Ambos han sido abandonados por una madre que prefirió una comunidad hippie en Ca lifornia a cualquier otro empeño. El humor de Houellebecq está más cerca de la risa desesperada que del fugacísimo regocijo del chiste. La novela, ambientada en el estricto presente, sucede como si las más pesadillescas parábolas de Kafka ya se hubieran hecho realidad, sin que nadie se haya dado cuenta.

Las partículas elementales

In Frankrijk komen de islamisten aan de macht, en keren het maatschappelijke bestel ondersteboven.

roman

Onderworpen / druk 1

Goncourt-Preisträger Michel Houellebecq erzählt in "Unterwerfung" die Geschichte des Literaturwissenschaftlers François. Der Akademiker forscht im Frankreich einer sehr nahen Zukunft zu dem dekadenten Schriftsteller Huysmans, der ihn sein Leben lang fasziniert. Zugleich verfolgt er die Ereignisse um die anstehende Präsidentschaftswahl: Während es dem charismatischen Kandidaten der Bruderschaft der Muslime gelingt, immer mehr Stimmen auf sich zu vereinigen, kommt es in der Hauptstadt zu tumultartigen Ausschreitungen. Wahllokale werden überfallen, Autos brennen auf den Straßen. Als schließlich ein Bürgerkrieg unabwendbar scheint, verlässt François Paris ohne ein bestimmtes Ziel vor Augen. Es ist der Beginn einer Reise in sein Inneres. "Unterwerfung" handelt vom Zusammenprall der Kulturen und stellt Fragen zum Verhältnis von Orient und Okzident, von Judentum, Islam und Christentum! Fragen, die heute so relevant sind wie nie. Michel Houellebecq präsentiert sich als furchtloser Gesellschaftsdenker, der die bestimmenden Spannungsverhältnisse unserer Epoche mit großer Ernsthaftigkeit und zugleich mit virtuoser Ironie ausdeutet. (Quelle: books.ch).

Der neue Roman

Le particelle elementari

The French presidential election of 2022 is around the corner; traditional parties are down in the polls, but Mohammed Ben Abbés, the charismatic leader of a new moderate Islamist force, defeats the National Front leader in the second round of voting. François is a middle-aged literature professor who observes that the everyday life of French citizen is changing beyond their control.

Michel Houellebecq

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