Elementary particles

the Elementary particles is a Romance of Michel Houellebecq published in 1998.

Michel Houellebecq is regarded as the writer most representative of the generation which followed May 68.

Summary

The history, in three parts, occurs between on July 1st, 1998 and on March 27th, 2009, and tells the alternate history of two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, born at the end of the Fifties that the chances of the life (and a nudge in the right direction of the parents) connected at a certain moment. Their mother, Janine, lived thoroughly the ideals of the permissive company. Born in 1928, it grows in Algeria (where his/her father had come to work as engineer) and came to Paris to supplement its studies; she danced the Bebop with Jean-Paul Sartre (which she found remarkably ugly), had many lovers (she was very beautiful) and Maria with a young virile surgeon who then made fortune in the relatively new field of the plastic surgeon (profession which must undoubtedly incarnate the superficiality of the time). The couple divorced two years after the birth Bruno, then him and his/her Michel brother was abandoned in very patient grandparents, Janine to therefore live in a community in California. In testing flashbacks, one notes the negligence which reigned with the house and brutality at the school where Bruno and Michel were registered. None of the two brothers, it are implied, forever really recovered these beginnings in the life.

Michel Djerzinski, given up by his parents, lived with his grandmother whose death caused at his place a violent traumatism which will prohibit to him thereafter to test truths feelings. It forever felt any major feeling towards its similar, except perhaps towards his/her grandmother, who raised it and who symbolizes in her eyes a species in the process of disappearance: “Of the human beings which worked all their life, and which worked hard, only by devotion and love; who literally gave their life to the others in a spirit of devotion and love. ” It had a love of adolescence, Annabelle. Michel sees Annabelle being detached from him for the son of one of the Californian lovers of Janine, which wanted to be a rock'n'roll-star. Researcher in biology, Michel carries out a gray existence between his Monoprix supermarket and the laboratory where it undertakes experiments of point on the cloning of the animals. The single person from which it is not moved away by light-years, it is her Bruno half-brother. He gives his leave after fifteen last years in a prestigious Parisian laboratory of CNRS. He gives of another explanation to his superiors only that expressing the need of time “to think”. He is afraid of the life and finds refuge behind a screen of certainty positivists and in the second reading of the autobiography of Heisenberg. Single person and independent, Michel (who lost his virginity at thirty years) feels unable to like and has little sexual libido, contrary to his half-brother of forty-two years, Bruno, who is obsessed by the sex: “Michel lived in a world (...) rate/rhythm by certain commercial ceremonies - the tournament of Roland-Garros, Christmas, on December 31st, the biannual appointment of the catalogs 3 Swiss. Homosexual, it could have taken share in Sidathon, or the Gay Pride. Libertine, it would have been filled with enthusiasm for the Living room of the erotism. More sporting, he would live at this same minute a Pyrenean stage of the Tour de France. Consumer without characteristics, it however accommodated with joy the return of Italian about fifteen in his Monoprix district. ” During these years, Anabelle took part in orgies and had two abortions. After their meeting again, Michel makes in his arms a quasi mystical experiment which gets a vision of space to him “as a very fine line which separated two spheres. In the first sphere was the being, and separation; in the second sphere were the non-being, and individual disappearance. Calmly, without hesitating, it was turned over and moved towards the second sphere”. Their attempt to rebuild what they lost is obstructed by the emotional coldness of Michel; it feels compassion for it but not love.

In his childhood, his/her Bruno half-brother was constrained in a boarding school with rapes with repetition and daily humiliations. The suffering of Bruno at the school is worsened by the relaxation deliberated on the school authority following the protests of May 68, the accent from now on being put on the self-discipline: “the year 1970 saw a fast extension of erotic consumption”. Teenager, Bruno with the practice to masturbate secretly whereas he sat close to a pretty young girl in the train which brings back it school. Parachuted in apartment the Bohemian of his mother during summer holidays, pale and already too large for its eighteen years, it feels embarrassed and badly in its place in the presence of the lovers hippies and bronzed his mother, and vis-a-vis the impatient insistence of this one to discuss its sexual inhibitions. The hatred which Bruno for Janine nourishes finds its expression of the years later when it spits to him of the insults to the figure whereas it is lying on its bed of death. Bruno now teaches the literature in a college of Dijon and always aspires to becoming writer. With the eyes of Michel, Bruno approaches the midlife crisis (it started to carry a leather overcoat and speaking like a character about film with Suspense about Série B). At the edge of the divorce and with a baby, in a sexual search without hope, it leaves in the nightclubs when it is supposed to supervise their son; it is continuously in search of sexual meetings very often disastrous “It threaded bathing trunks, slipped of the condoms into its satchel of a gesture which tore off a short laughter to him. During years it had carried condoms on him permanently, that had never been used to him for nothing; in any event, the whores had some”. At other moments, it surfe to seek porn on Internet (with for result an invoice of telephone of 14.000 francs which he hides with his wife). Bruno, is completely immersed in the life, his desire leads it to multiply the experiments (marriage, linen room, living room of massage, prostitution, Blue message service, echangism, orgy, sex shops, etc). Dangerously attracted by its pupils teenagers, it causes the black boyfriend of the one of enters he at the point to attract itself reprisals and mocking remarks. In one moment of rageuse jealousy, it launches out in a racist leaflet sent ad infinitum, a review published by the sulfurous writer of avant-garde Philippe Sollers. Both meet in a Parisian coffee, Sollers holds up its cigarette-holder: Philippe Sollers seemed to be a known writer; however, the reading of Women showed it with obviousness, it succeeded in lining out only old whores belonging to the cultural mediums; the iron ores, obviously, preferred the singers. Under these conditions, what good is it to publish poems with the idiot in a merdic review? Sollers appreciates its text on Jean-Paul II: “You is Réactionnaire, it is well. All the great writers are reactionaries. Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Dostoïevski: that reactionaries. But it is necessary to kiss, also, hein? Partouzer is needed. It is important.” Sollers reconsiders its decision to publish this article but Bruno throws it to the dustbin by recognizing that it was about a " absurdité". Bruno meets Christiane at the time of' a stay instead of the Change, camp-site post-soixante-huitard tendency new old. Like Christiane, who has fifty-five years, mother divorced a boy of ten year, it came there for the sex. For it the devastations of the generation of 68 are obvious on the women who take part in the workshops: “In general they made an analysis, that completely dried them”. With it, it founds a family and thus builds a certain balance - that it destroys at once afterwards. Christiane takes along Bruno in a relentless travels of sex in group with German tourists and of orgy out of Parisian nightclub evil famed.

Whereas frustration leads Bruno to the doors of the madness and the suicide, and after the death of Annabelle, Michel engages in a solitary reflection which will involve a scientific revolution comparable with the work of Einstein: by dissociating the reproduction of the pleasure radically, it will make it possible humanity to finally know peace. One finds Michel in a Research center of Genetics to Galway; its life received a new dash because of a revolutionary theory which it developed: convinced that the human race is condemned by its foolish fight against the anguish of death, and by contradiction between modern life on the one hand and on the other hand the emotional life inherent in the reproduction, it works with a project of genetically modified, immortal and sterile race -- although not stripped of personality nor of sexual pleasure. Its work, which is continued after its death in 2009, led to nothing less than creation, in 2029, of a genetically controlled race and finally with the extinction of the human race.

See too

homonymous Film rewarded for a Bear of money of the best actor in 2006.

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