Michel Houellebecq
Les particules élémentaires

Who really is Michel Houellebecq? A brilliant writer, a visionary, a kind of charlatan, simply a provocateur or perhaps all of these things together. He is undoubtedly a controversial figure and stands out for statements that are at the very least unconventional: in France, he has been one of the most discussed figures in the political debate for quite some time now. This is mainly due to his anti-Islamist positions, which are mostly the result of considerations about the decline of "Western" society based on the principles of so-called "social anticipation." Analyses that are brilliant and expressed with a very simple style and a clarity that I recognize in any case. His point of view on the matter is clear, as expressed in "Soumission" (2015): if the assumption is indeed the end and failure of what he considers Western and particularly European life models, then it is evident that given the constant flow of population of Islamic faith on the continent, their socio-cultural model will eventually prove to be the only acceptable alternative with consequences on our culture and social system.

"Les particules élémentaires," first published in 1998, is nonetheless mainly dedicated to a critical analysis of the Western world. The two protagonists are two half-brothers, apparently united only by the abandonment of their mother, who travels the world seeking to satisfy her ego in places like hippie and new age communities and by the absence of their respective fathers. One of them is Michel Djerzinski. A brilliant molecular biologist, he is a person of aseptic character, seemingly uninterested in everything around him and only interested in getting to the bottom of his studies in the field of genetics and metaphysics (which, moreover, conceptually constitutes the trade union on which the entire work is based). The brother Bruno Clément, on the other hand, is a man of letters, teaches in high schools, and could be defined as a failed writer (but in truth he doesn't care much about this), but above all, he is morbidly attracted to sex, a true pathology that forces him to periodically be hospitalized in psychiatric clinics.

The story of their tormented existence, a difficult childhood lived in solitude or amidst a thousand sufferings and abuses of all kinds in boarding school, until reaching adulthood and the inability to have relationships with others and particularly with those of the opposite sex, is the story of a man living in the second half of the 20th century and in an unhappy and troubled era.

Houellebecq harshly criticizes what he describes as a decadent society, where everyone is engaged in the pursuit of personal satisfaction that cannot be attained and that constitutes something ideal but that concretely does not exist. Everyone moves in a reality devoid of true reference points, materialism and hedonism reign supreme. Also based on these considerations, in the end, completely closed in on himself and immersed in his studies, Michel Djerzinski revolutionizes the very foundations of human existence and after the first two revolutions in the field of metaphysics, the advent of Christianity, and the affirmation of the scientific system, he ushers in the third and final one. The price to be paid, in the end, will be the end of history and the existence of the human race as we know it and the passage to a new era through a revolution in the field of genetics. For this reason, this book is then dedicated to man, at the moment when its last representatives (which are us) are destined for extinction.