The end of the world announced.

The Elementary Particles / Michel Houellebecq (Price November 1998)
It is a real UFO in French publishing that novel by Michel Houellebecq. A tasty UFO. A very tasty and delicious treat. Some were to be disgusted: I understand in part. Love it or do not like Houellebecq and dishes that we serve.
It is certainly not literature to Flaubert and Le Clezio. MH But he did not have a policy to go into the meaning of this phrase of Schopenhauer: "The first and practically only requirement of a good style is to have something to say. "
So the language is often crude, direct, provocative without circumlocution, surprising, rich in understatements and ellipses. No formal research, but rather a neutral style with some waves, however !! It does not get bored, and the passage of one topic to another disconcerting time finally fun. We jump happily without any transition of the vulva withered sixty eighters backward ERP paradox and Aspect's experiment on non localization. Then the pigeons pecking indiscriminate alternative development. Great art! There's even romantic passages that reflect well the high sensitivity of the author.
Scalpel descriptions as some critics have said, clinic writing, cold and impersonal, often technical, wry humor and a factual kind caricature cartoon: and these are the MH weapons to keep us in suspense throughout these 300 pages where the themes of emotional and sexual misery of Western man, his existential loneliness are constantly underlyings. The depth of the thought of the author can not then escape the attentive reader.
"Once you get divorced, that the family was broken, relationships with her children lose sense. The child is the trap has closed, it is the enemy that we will have to continue to maintain and that will survive you. "(Bruno Reflection)
The beginning of the novel refers to a number of family trees which will have to remember seen the number of secondary characters who participate in the life of the account. And second particular point: we have to get used to the many scientific or other digressions (as in The Map and the Territory for that matter), peppering the narrative. Sometimes MH offers us a real course of natural science and particle physics.
Two characters, two half brothers to be honest, faces life with varying success. Bruno, associate professor who had a troubled childhood and in old age leads an almost permanent quest for pleasure, a great lover Swinger, and Michel, biology researcher somewhat enlightened, the borders of a sweet madness, taciturn loner , asocial no great impulse, without desire, without love.
The recurring misanthropy MH does not default to this story. His favorite themes are there: the decline of the civilization of which he wrote a scathing satire, progressive decay of moral values, social atomization in the 70s, an analysis under the microscope without concessions and without illusion, cruel, cynical, relentless and unrealistic to that company, the denunciation of liberalism in all areas, a disgust of the world as part of a pessimistic metaphysical, the inevitable obsolescence of objects and people. The characters are obsessed with aging and decrepitude, physical and intellectual decline with "a downward trend in the rate of fun," leading to a "deleterious entelechy."
Several passages reminds me of Foreign Albert Camus particularly in the tragic moments that leave an impression of detachment, absence from the characters affected by adversity. Loneliness also when we consider Michel's life: "His life as a man he had lived alone in a cosmic vacuum. He had contributed to the progress of knowledge: it was her vocation, it was the way he found to express his natural gifts; but love, he had not known. "
So a book as a columnist said, which gives food for thought. The influence that may have Aldous and Julian Huxley is undeniable when you consider the content of the epilogue that crowns this beautiful well built building. While this story is in fact a history of the decline of a civilization, that of the last decades of the twentieth century, told by a narrator who lives in the year 2029, time which saw the advent of a "new human species asexual and immortal, surpassing individuality, separation and becoming. " The work of Michel genetically encoded eventually led to the genetically modified humans. Indeed replication of a "genetic code in a structurally stable standard form, inaccessible to disturbance and mutations allowed the appearance of this new species whose entire cell can be equipped with an infinite capacity of successive replications. "
The conclusion is grand; debate climbed a rung and the narrator declaring: "History exists; it is imposed, it dominates, his empire is inevitable. But beyond the strictly historical, the ultimate ambition of this book is to salute this brave and unfortunate species that created us. This painful and vile species, barely different from monkeys, which nevertheless carried with it many noble aspirations. This tortured species, contradictory, individualistic and quarrelsome, unlimited egoism, sometimes capable of extreme violence of explosions, but never yet ceased to believe in the goodness and love. .. "Sublime finding!
It does not come out unscathed from this reading.