The Elementary Particles Paperback – November 13, 2001

After reading The Map and the Territory (2010), I was determined to read more of the work of Michel Houellebecq. I chose The Elementary Particles (1998) because it was mentioned frequently in social media. I thought it would be as interesting and entertaining as his most recent novel. I was not disappointed.The novel is a story of two half-brothers living in France, sharing a mother but fathered by two very different men. The family history is presented in a somewhat chaotic fashion in the first section of the book, "The Lost Kingdom." The descriptions of the family development of Bruno and Michel are brief and loosely connected leaving the reader unsure of the strength of influence of the blood relatives. The two brothers live separately as children and do not meet until later in the novel. The first section is good because it is difficult to find any sort of systematic influence of social/environmental variables that determine the different adult personalities of Bruno and Michel. Both are phlegmatic, but Bruno is a low-key, extroverted hedonist while Michel is an introverted social isolate.The Lost Kingdom section sets the stage for the main theme of the novel that begins to be played out in section two, Strange Moments. Largely through conversations the brothers have in brotherly meetings, their past and current lives are chronicled. The illusion of cause and effect in the lives of individuals suggests that we are pre-determined by key events (quanta) in our lives that are elemental and irreversible. We have become "atomised." The extension of this assumption is that if we just think rationally about peak events, we can gain control of and freedom from them. Much of our thinking is `reductionistic' in the guise of insightful rumination: If only this had happened, If only I had done that. The problem the two brothers face is that there are no elementary particles of personal development, of thoughts or behaviors. When Bruno and Michel choose to focus on social variables from their pasts, they perceive patterns that they incorporate into their self-concepts. The consequences are for years, both miss the point of life, that elementary discrete particles of personality are actually inextricable components of social/cultural unfolding `waves.' Key factors are woven into a continuous fabric from birth to death with nothing left out or isolated except in a person's own mind.In the third part, Emotional Infinity, Bruno, a secondary school teacher, keeps looking for the pleasurable factors that seem to be missing in his life as he obsessively seeks sexual activity and elusive pleasure. Michel, a biophysicist keeps looking for elementary physical particles that determine the ontology of the human being. Working on the implications of the scientific description of the human genome, he finds that even with cloning there is the possibility of mutations at the point of meiosis that are random when human sexuality takes its normal course. His idea is that sexual activity may be separated from human procreation, using a laboratory platform of meiosis that would eliminate the possibility of spontaneous mutation. This would reduce the human genome to set quanta. Sexuality then becomes a non-essential, free-flowing, continuous factor that can be used for part of a person's pleasure, while the manipulation of the human genome on a stable platform in the laboratory can be used for producing people who are free from certain diseases both mental and physical. This will not cause a revolution in human history but rather an evolution over a greatly extended time, as with all paradigm shifts."Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" was a phrase coined by social scientist, G. Stanley Hall. The fabric of life of the individual and the species is woven by continuous development in our total environment. The concepts of social isolation, dominant social stages, physical space, and infinitely small atomic and subatomic particles are delusions perpetuated by our desire for scientific answers. All of our subjective and scientific experiences in the world that we are conscious of or observe with instruments involve what Michel sees as an "interweaving" of all things. This is a comforting conclusion of continuity when we think of death as some sort of lonely event or qualitative gate to a better environment.The Elementary Particles is a lovely novel that is a delusion in and of itself that I choose to perpetuate, as a persistent, continuous, false belief.

As I was reading (in the case of The Elementary Particles - absorbing, pondering, considering) I was eventually convinced this was a very good book (4 stars). After all, the basic story line of two half-brothers being effectively abandoned by a hippie/hedonist mother to make their own, separate ways in the world was original, if somewhat counter to actual hippie values. And yet the story was well told and the author made marvelous use of a carrot and stick approach with his audience. Most chapters began with a dry, hyper- and/or pseudo-scientific examination of the older brother Michel's work as a molecular biologist. Just as this became too much, after say four or five paragraphs, Houellebecq switched gears and dove into Bruno's, the younger brother, myriad sexual exploits. Though both boys are clearly dysfunctional, the back and forth and the constant forward motion are compelling. The author also drops numerous pronouncements about life and humankind throughout, the type of thing to either dismiss or to pay attention to and appreciate. Approaching the last of the book, I became convinced that this was not just a good book but perhaps a great work. (5 stars). And there it would have stayed, had not the unfortunate Epilogue reared it's ill-fitting head. For reasons not clear the author felt the need to convert what had been a well-written, complex, thought-provoking contemporary novel into a work of science fiction, to this reader's mind, thereby lessening it's believability and impact. The work was stronger when every reader could decide for him- or herself what the ultimate outcome of these two lives would have been. Still, an excellent work of literature, well worth the read (just minus that fifth star - final rating, 4 stars).

When Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky examined the imagined consequences of the death of God, a certain grandeur attached to their endeavor. Residing in a world not yet devoid of certainty and standards, of rhythms and roles, they prophesied the proliferation of atheists pulsing with amoral energy, or saw an opening for the birth of a new man, superior by virtue of his freedom from the restraints of Christianity.We who now live in that foretold world excuse the romantic elements in the visions of the existentialists. That they got the broad strokes right Houllecbecq regards as self-evident: The Elementary Particles passes over the death of God and the absence of an immortal soul or a divinely ordained morality as a novel of seafaring might the nature of water. But life, unromantic and tangible human life, is not experienced in broad and abstract strokes, but rather in the gaps between.To live among the gaps is to live within the worldview which forms the background of each epoch of human life. For the West today this means to live with only negative certainty about questions of meaning and existence. The old answers to the big questions we can no longer believe and no new ones have shown themselves.This state of affairs drives the characters of the novel to retreat into other forms of certainty. For Bruno it is the orgasm, for Michel it is his work and science; for almost every character it is a near complete selfishness and individualism. Instead of philosophical criminals and life affirming overmen we find beings confused and exhausted by a materialism both ineluctable and irredeemably feeble. Little retains its potency in our life among the gaps other than the certainty of death.With death and dying, the negative certainties of our worldview seem to collapse. Approaching death we find an immaterial fog that cannot be fully lifted, and the question, posed by another drawer of our epoch’s conclusions, McCarthy’s Judge Holden, perplexes us still: “Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not?” We know the answer prescribed by the analytics of our worldview: death is extinction and its immateriality an illusion. That we remain perplexed speaks only to the reality of our limitations, not reality itself. But can a worldview satisfy in parts when it leaves us dissatisfied, devastatingly so, when confronted with its core?My reading of Houllecbecq suggest his answer is no. Slowly his characters, and with them the modern West, are shown to have inherited existential broad strokes that make living between their gaps untenable. The tension of life among these gaps builds and builds, just as it would have for livers and breathers of the religious worldview as it was bombarded by science and the doubt it fostered. New frocks of transcendence, whether blood and nation or sects and ideologies, are tried and discarded. The defiance of past ways creates exhilarations that bloom and wither in ever shorter intervals.These failings leave naught but tension, tension that fills in the gaps, covers them until there is no space left; until all possibilities have been exhausted; until a final pattern reveals itself with the closing of the last gap. And upon this new pattern the broad strokes of a new epoch are first made, incommensurable with the last.But if religion collapsed under the weight of the scientific world, what hope is there when our hearts made secular can no more bear the findings of materialism than could the theology of the past? Might the distinction between the religious pattern and the secular be illusory? Our experience the closing of the gaps of a grander pattern, its contours formed by the collision of human heart and world? Might resolution of the last contradiction and slackening of humanity’s unbearable tension require the very hearts and minds that perceive them be left behind, filling in the final gaps of mankind’s final pattern?

submissionの出来に感激して、「この作家は才能がある！」と確信した僕にとって２作目の作品。正直、イマイチでした。久々「途中でやめようか」と思ったくらい。最後まで読むとそこそこの読後感を味わえるんだけど、まぁ無理して読むほどの小説でもありません。欲しいものリストに登録してた他の作品も削除しました。

Read a couple of novels in a week and then got 'stuck' on this for several weeks. I was not feeling the set up, the first half, the free-love critique (or rather just observation of). I nearly quit this book. I don't like quitting books. I really like Houellebcq as a writer although he could never truly be my favourite. He's brilliant and edgy and I perceive his writing as a little 'fractured'; almost like trying to picture the Mona Lisa using theoretical physics.Anyway, I stuck through and just after the mid point it unveiled its mystique to me. If there is one thing that Houellebeq is a writer that is generally thought provoking. I had trudged through the mud, the crowds, the noise and the boredom and reached the show. I read the last half of the book in one night.So as much as I struggled to get in to this book I knew, once I'd put it down that I'd gained more from it than the next few novels I would likely read.Recommended.

Je me suis trompé en commandant ce livre en anglais..... Je voudrais l'échanger en FRANCAISComment procéder ? Merci de me renseigner.

Estoy muy contento con la compra y con el servicio prestado por el vendedor y el mensajero. Todo en orden. Gracias

I simply hated this book. The characters are so unreal, the sexual extremism is to much. If it wasn't part of our book club I would have certainly stopped reading after a few pages