Michel Houellebecq (born Michel Thomas), born 26 February 1958 (birth certificate) or 1956 on the French island of Réunion, is a controversial and award-winning French novelist. To admirers he is a writer in the tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire; to detractors he is a peddler, who writes vulgar sleazy literature to shock. He currently resides in France, where he has been described as "France’s biggest literary export and, some say, greatest living writer". In 2010 he published La Carte et le Territoire (published the same year in English as The Map and the Territory) which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt; and, in 2015, Submission.
His works though, particularly Atomised, have received high praise from the French literary intelligentsia, with generally positive international critical response, Having written poetry and a biography of the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, he brought out his first novel Extension du domaine de la lutte in 1994. Les particules élémentaires followed in 1998 and Plateforme, in 2001.
The main character of the book is completely disillusioned with life, quits his job and leaves home; its only companion is pills that supply the body with serotonin and completely kill interest in what is happening. We will explain why this novel about modern Europe and depression is the author's best work in the last twenty years.
Since the time of the second and most famous novel by the Frenchman Michel Houellebecq "Elementary Particles", which tells about the fate of two strikingly different brothers, biologist Michel and teacher Bruno, all the heroes of the modern French classic can be divided into two large types with some degree of convention. Equally lonely and unhappy, they differ in one important quality. The former, like Michel, descend from the "Stranger" Albert Camus: they have a very weak connection with reality, they are sad, detached and already almost devoid of human desires and attachments. Others, like Bruno, are much more closely connected with the world: they are not so much sad as irritated and angry, they still need sex, food, human warmth, justice, the meaning of life. Understandably, within the framework of the Wellebecq picture of the world, where the best scenario always looks like a painless death, "bruno" is much more unhappy than "Michels", because their unaffected hearts (well, other parts of the body) cause their owners constant pain and incalculable suffering.
If we take such a matrix as a basis, then the protagonist of Houellebecq's new novel "Serotonin" is forty-six-year-old Florent-Claude Labrouste, bilious, sarcastic, rude, of course, a typical "bruno" - at least at first. The reader meets him at a sun-drenched gas station in southern Spain, simultaneously staring at a pretty young brown-haired woman and pondering how, through an accident, at once to get rid of both the tired Japanese concubine and the hateful existence in general. This spectacular plan does not work, at the last moment Florent-Claude twists the steering wheel, returning his SUV to the track, but in a sense the decision has already been made: the old life has come to an end.
Florent-Claude collects things, leaves the Ministry of Agriculture, where he served before, leaves an at least lived-in apartment (along with the ill-fated Japanese woman) and, without any further plan, settles in a hotel, the only advantage of which is that rooms for smokers are still provided. ... From there, he will eventually move to Normandy, where he will witness and without five minutes a participant in the tragically doomed struggle of local farmers for survival: the peasants who rebelled against the tyranny of the European Union will be led by the hero's only friend, the hereditary aristocrat Emeric d'Ancourt, acting in the manner of the Marquis de Lantenac from the novel by Victor Hugo "93", who led the rebellion of the Vendée Chouans.
Deeper and deeper into despair, Florent-Claude will travel through the deserted French outback with sporadic forays into Paris, remembering former friends and making sure that the old love, trust and happiness (mostly destroyed by himself) will not be returned. Once his companion in this aimless journey becomes a small oval-shaped pill with a notch in the middle - it is Captorix, a new generation of antidepressant. Generously supplying its consumer with serotonin and thereby maintaining its formal functionality, Captorix completely kills his libido and interest in what is happening. From the jovial and witty “bruno” clinging to life, Florent-Claude is gradually mutating into an aloof “Michelle”, and now the length of his stay among the living is determined solely by the amount of money in the bank account - nothing else keeps him here.
If the plot of "Serotonin" seemed vaguely familiar to you (the stochastic wanderings of the hero, superimposed on the general picture of the decline and destruction of European civilization), then you are undoubtedly right: Houellebecq has already exploited approximately the same scheme both in "Map and Territory" and in the recent "Obedience". Moreover, the hero of "Serotonin" at some point even unsuccessfully tries to implement the same plan, which is carried out by the better adapted hero of "Obedience" - to spend Christmas in a monastery. This time, however, the ratio of the components is somewhat different: the heartbreaking personal drama is not only formally brought to the fore, but indeed the key one for Houellebecq. And the collapse of traditional Europe (for this segment are the passages associated with the agriculture of France) is described extremely realistically - without the fantastic assumptions characteristic of the writer, and therefore gives the impression of much greater penetration and sharpness.
Formally, "Serotonin" is a stream of consciousness in which there is a place for both an ingenious play on words (masterfully rendered in Russian by the constant translator of Houellebecq Maria Zonina), and for the hero's reflections on the work of Gogol or, for example, Lamartine, and for erotic fantasies, and for endless memories, and to describe erratic migrations. If it were not for the figure of Florent-Claude himself, who is radically different from Houellebecq himself, the novel could be considered as fashionable today autofixing in the spirit of Karl Uwe Knausgaard (in fact, the hero himself, not without bitter irony, hints at such an interpretation). However, perhaps it would be more correct to nevertheless lead it to the Proust tradition - perhaps in place of the melancholic slowness inherent in Proust, one will have to substitute the trademark Welshbeck bitterness.
It is this burning bitterness that permeates every line of "Serotonin" - not anger, not grief, not even longing (although towards the end the hero literally begins to die of melancholy), but it is precisely this sobering and almost salvific bitterness that acts on the reader as a slap in the face and becomes the final element that crowns the novel Serotonin formula and makes it truly flawless. The delightful harmony of the background (disintegration of systems and models traditional for France), action (personal crisis turning into a peak) and intonation make it possible to speak of Houellebecq's new novel as a truly outstanding text and definitely the best book of the writer since the times of the already mentioned "Elementary Particles" ...
This article was sponsored by Jason Frank
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