- ‘I mightn’t have done much good in my life, but at least I contributed to the destruction of the planet.’
- The unfortunately christened Florent-Claude Labrouste is 46 years old and a typical Houellebecq sad fuck. Cynical, disillusioned and alone. The sort of bloke that hates Paris and hates pensioners. He's wonderful company - intelligent and exceptionally well-informed, and he’s confiding in YOU.
- In the typical Houellebecq way, literary references are sprinkled throughout, mostly cheekily. And very satisfyingly there's so much wisdom:
'...there can't be an area of human activity as utterly boring as the law'.
'...our student years are the only happy ones, when the future seems open, when everything seems possible, and after that adulthood and a career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut'.
‘...alcohol is very important for the elderly, it’s almost all they’ve got left’.
‘God is a mediocre scriptwriter...the whole of his creation bears the stamp of approximation and failure, when it isn’t meanness pure and simple’.
- He studied agriculture and started working initially at the giant corporate Monsanto, and hated it. ‘My superiors in the company were quite simply pathological liars’. Now he’s working for the Department of Agriculture and negotiating with Brussels.
- As part of his job he travels a lot, all over France it seems, and drops names of streets, provinces, villages and locales, and this is rather challenging. I had to continually call on Google maps to follow his journeys.
- Of course there's lots of sex. In fact, there's an obsessional focus on it as he reflects on his former girlfriends and lovers. But it’s very funny too, as if sex is a type of comedy routine carried out by two people, or one woman and a dog or two. This time he's far more comic than in any of his previous novels, which adds to its delight. The thing is though, he rarely makes love, just seems to get blowjobs. It’s all about his cock. Ironically, however, his new anti-depression medication makes it well nigh impossible for him to get an erection.
- Houellebecq is a very political novelist and this novel is no exception. Florent-Claude's good friend and fellow agriculture student began working for Danone on graduation, and later bought a farm, raising dairy cows in the very local, traditional way. But Brussels’ decisions would bankrupt him and millions of French stockbreeders. The EU and its free trade policies were devastating. The Chinese were also buying traditional farm lands. The local farmers started organising and protesting, some with guns. It all ended tragically, with countless suicides.
- In the end he's fading away, sadness overwhelming him. But he offers us deep and rewarding reflections on Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
- And in a passage of exquisitely beautiful prose, he describes his simple joy on listening to a bootleg recording of the rock band Deep Purple in concert in Duisburg in 1970.
- Reading Houellebecq is always a pleasure, and Serotonin is absolutely no exception.
There's another French contemporary writer who is the complete opposite to Houellebecq and who has a lot to say about the times we live in. It's Marc-Edouard Nabe.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough he knew Houellebecq in the nineties and Houellebecq was evidently inspired by him, though he never acknowledged it publicly. Nabe wrote about Houellebecq in several books though. Still untranslated unfortunately but there's a video of his first famous and scandalous 1985 TV appearance with English subtitles:
https://youtu.be/2XM6SksSlVw