Houellebecq is a master of controversy and of the subversive pen.
The publication of Atomised resulted in his being rejected by his
circle for being outrageously politically incorrect, making
front-page news across the national French press. Bleak, cruel,
wickedly funny and all-embracing, Atomised is a brilliant
dismemberment of Western society and an exposure of the failure of
1960s sexual liberalism. Houellebecq weaves eugenics, animal
behaviour, psychology, addiction and depression, erotica,
spiritualism, TV and supermarket culture, and the icons of 20th
century philosophy and literature, into the story of half-brothers,
Bruno and Michel. Dumped by their parents on their maternal and
paternal grandmothers respectively, their childhoods are scarred by
loneliness and social alienation. Cripplingly shy, Bruno
masturbates over porn mags and is bullied and raped by the older
boys at boarding school. Michel turns to science and lives in a
dream world. The boys meet in their teens thanks to their inept
mother. She left Algiers for Paris in 1945. 'A stunning
Mediterranean beauty' she was one of those who 'already showed
symptoms of the compulsive, almost fetishistic desire for
prepackaged pleasures that would sweep through the populace in
decades that followed'. She exchanged her first husband, a plastic
surgeon, for a second, a promising documentary film-maker, whom she
abandoned in turn for 'di Meola who had met Ginsberg and Huxley and
was a founding member of the Esalen commune'. Her peripatetic life
in pursuit of free love leads her from the South of France to
California and Goa. Michel becomes a successful molecular
biologist, incapable of loving; 'the world of human emotions was
not his field'. In his teens he fails to sense that his gorgeous
childhood friend is falling in love with him and when they are
reunited in their forties, he feels nothing. She dies of cancer. He
moves to Ireland to pursue his research and discovers a gene
capable of creating 'a similar species, reproduced by cloning and
therefore immortal' which sends shockwaves through the scientific
community. Bruno turns to literature and teaching. A sexual
obsessive, he drools over the Lolitas in his class. He is unable to
communicate with his wife and son. For Bruno there is 'one source
of warmth, between a woman's thighs, but there seemed no way for
him to reach it'. At a new age camp site he meets Christiane, and
at last it seems he has found the right woman. They holiday at a
nudist colony. Her sudden death drives him back to alcoholism and
porn. His writing becomes increasingly cynical, racist and
homophobic; he is fascinated by death and decay. He has a breakdown
and is hospitalised. Emotional cripples, the brothers reflect the
dark underbelly of modern society and consumerism; the pain and
ugliness of life. A world without love. A Manichaean world ruled by
men in which women - the madonna or the whore are vehicles for
compassion or sex and not much else. Atomised is the ultimate
polemic, a bitter and twisted diatribe; the stuff of nightmares.
Read it. (Kirkus UK)
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 (Les Particules elementaires) tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is in its dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, in 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.
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