Michel Houellebecq
Serotonina

It had been a long time since I last read a novel. And it had been a long time since I read a novel with such speed. The reason for all this speed (about 300 pages in approximately 5 hours) does not necessarily have to do with the interest Serotonin sparked in me, an interest that diminished rather quickly, let's say around page 100. I had already read two books by the same author about 20 years ago (Atomised and The Possibility of an Island), and it was like finding on a train a friend you so admired in adolescence for his ability to surprise you, to tell you new, interesting, amusing, scandalous, sometimes horrifying but always interesting things and whom you find after 20 years saying the exact same interesting, amusing, scandalous, horrifying things, etc. But 20 years have passed, and he, evidently, has remained the same and you have not, which is a bit strange. It's a shame, too. You part ways with the knowledge that you will never see each other again, or at least you hope so. So why this voracity, this need to get to the end of a book whose ending is much more predictable than one might expect from someone who "shocks consciousness," as Houellebecq has surely been defined somewhere? Perhaps an answer can be found in the objectively enjoyable writing of our friend, which makes the journey anything but boring. The irony tinged with sarcasm, all declined into desperate and wicked cynicism, remains an entertaining and unusual register that makes it unique (if you want, it reminds you of a Céline, even in appearance, among other things). But the same as himself, I repeat. What fascinated you once: the extreme freedom to express everything that goes through the mind of an average European male adult (essentially chicks, necessarily young, then little else) today simply makes you smile and makes you a little sad. It's a bit like the kind of melancholy you feel when you think of Woody Allen and his need to tell his story to the world, a need that was once pure gold but that we would have hoped (at least that's how I see it) would have become more discreet with age, and not the opposite. After all, H. wants us to feel sad: his character is tragic, his thinking is tragic, his life is tragic, a life where women exploit or are exploited, and in any case, they represent the alpha and omega of an existence otherwise devoid of meaning. Perhaps it's sad because it is a reasonably credible portrait of the modern male, who has lost God but found Pornhub, childish and egocentric, and proud to be so. Personally, having hoped to find an allusion to the relationship between drugs and modern despondency in the title (and the frontispiece), the simple description of the capricious annihilation of one's own life by an angry fifty-year-old frankly bored me a bit. But for someone reading H. for the first time, it might be an interesting encounter, with brilliant writing often cynically amusing (I would be curious to know what a woman thinks of this book). I will avoid mentioning the plot, which is scant indeed, a rather crude juxtaposition between the existential decline of our desperate fifty-year-old and the decline of a Western empire victim of globalization, another theme dear to H. (let's say it, he has an unpronounceable name).