Just finished this. Thoughts?

...

Now read Atomised and Platform. If you like them, go for the rest of Houellebecq's novels.

Lanzarote isn't worth your time (even if it's very short).

This is one of the worst posts I've ever seen here.

Agreed. OP doesn't even bother to give her opinion.

Misogynist trash.

OP's thoughts:

self indulgent

funny

prose is mixed, he ends chapters well

The ending is weak, IMO

i just read this, did i just read this?

I heard the prose is butchered in this translation. Remember when he says he's not going to use flowery language a the start and then transpires a load of clunky ass Robert Galbraith / Rowling style shit. I think in French it's way more crude which would have saved it for me, I read this translation and won't be reading anything else of this dudes now.

That's totally unfair and if you think that you're a moron, the whole book's an elaborate send-up of the narrator.

definitly maybe

I liked Submission and am currently reading Platform and enjoying it. Is this any good compared to those?

>Atomised instead of "The Elementary Particles"
>"Whatever" instead of "Extension of the Domain of the Struggle".

Translators and editors think american readers are dumb or what?

yes, if you like those two, read it.

I know 'Extension of the Domain of the Struggle' is a sort of perversion of some sort of French student movement slogan, so they (understandably) don't expect English speakers to 'get' this title

Is this the novel where the protagonist becomes involved with a white supremacist organization and writes pamphlets comparing the negroes lack of self-consciousness and sexual restraint and the frigid, neurotic sex of the european male?

That part was really good, a nice insight into how intellectualism shackles the European man and renders him a spiritual and physical cripple.

no, that's atomised / elementary particles.

That was a small part of the book but I've posted it on here a few tmes because it was so funny

Ah ok, I haven't read these in a long time.

Yes it is funny, but it is also a very good lesson I think. Many western men have a very abstract relationship with their sexuality, I think partly this is because men are of course more sexually frigid than women in all instances, but also because after the enlightenment, we've had a tendency towards intellectualism and been neglectful of cultivating physicality and spirit. You must live as much with your heart, eyes, ears, hands and penis as you do with your intellect.

>I just ate this.
>Did it taste good?

Bread looks dry. Eggs overcooked. Probably not.

>eating coffee

good one m8

are you implying carbs don´t taste nice if they´re prepared badly

Atomised is the name of the UK edition. It's called The Elementary Particles in America.

I like Houellebecq's books, but I can never read two books of him in a row. Need a long pause.

And it's not so much that I'm shocked or whatever, it's more that I really feel like I'd hate him as a person if I ever got to meet him.

Sure, he's right about the sexual revolution and a bunch of other things.
But he, like Lacan and all the other French fucks, have these absolute enraging dumb gestures which are part of the staple of French intellectual life that infuriate the fuck out of me.
Just watch any of his interviews. And Lacan for that matter as well. Deleuze has it too, with that dumb "hmmm, dunno, do I really need to explain this, I'd rather smoke cigarettes, n'est pas?"
You'll never see a non-French behave like that.
Plus the whole "je m'en fous about ze world, hon hon hon hon" tone in his books are sometimes too much for me.

Not to mention his hatred of individualism and how he longs for us to disregard our self because, like all these structuralist fucks in Europe "iz an illusion". It's like he is completely rudderless without there being these cuckold ass rules.