It looks like you have. I'm almost done with 'La possibilité d'une île'.
― M. White (Miguelito), Friday, 30 September 2005 19:22 (twenty years ago)
well i've read atomised, platform, whatever and almost finished lanzarote. i've read something somewhere that reckons he has a deliberate anti-american theme. i'm not sure myself. i saw it as a general point made about western malaise. jesus i'm so tired i can hardly express meself this evening. maybe re-visit this when i've had a sleep!
― cake (cake), Friday, 30 September 2005 19:38 (twenty years ago)
marvellous. ta very much.
reminds me that i keep meaning to give lovecraft a read.
not sure where to start though.
any clues?
sheesh. have i just hi-jacked my own thread?
i'm new.
― cake (cake), Friday, 30 September 2005 20:08 (twenty years ago)
eleven months pass...
Finally finished Possibilité d'une île (on my third attempt). I don't really know what to think of it. It could certainly do with some editing.
― Baaderonixx: the lost ILX years (baaderonixx), Friday, 22 September 2006 07:54 (nineteen years ago)
I'm finding diminishing returns with Houellebecq. I was pretty blown away by Les Particules élémentaires, which felt original and tackling big themes, compared to the navel-gazing of most contemporary French literature. The next one I read, his first novel Extension de la domaine de la lutte, I thought was even better, since structurally more focused, although with the same kind of controversial sociological analysis. With Platforme, boredom started to set in. It was eminently readable but the hardcore porn factor started getting very repetitive. I started reading Lanzarote but didn't finish it, and I'm not sure I'm going to bother with Possibliité d'une île.
― Revivalist (Revivalist), Friday, 22 September 2006 08:44 (nineteen years ago)
eleven months pass...
Posted this in ILE, but I'm cross-posting here in case for form's sake.
Just finished Atomised. Read it about a year after Platform, which I hated so much I promised myself I'd avoid ME for the rest of my natural life. But resolve has never been my strong suit, and I felt I was shortchanging our intrepid anti-hero by failing to consider his most celebrated novel.
Well, I enjoyed it. Sort of. It engaged me and compelled me to finish it, though by the final third I was skimming as much as I was reading. But I didn't like it. I fact I kind of hated it, much in the same way I hated Platform. It all just seems so obvious, so childish and so tiresome. He's obviously very intelligent and erudite, and it's fun to watch him draw connections between seemingly disparate things - much like David Foster Wallace in that respect - but his view of human life and 20th century history is so one-dimensional and predictabley reactionary. Everything he does seems calculated to outrage.
I'm just not buying it. None of it offends me, but nor does it convince me. And the view of human relationships seems to operate at the same level as a bad night at a comedy club - a bunch of shitty, easy platitudes & cliches strung together and presented as "the awful truth". And sure, he's not wrong in pointing out that most men are rather emotionally stunted, that late 20th century humanism is self-deluding & perhaps even morally bankrupt. But so what? How is any of this a big deal?
Frankly, it's hard to find in this book a single surprising or observation - especially given that his characters are rarely more than two-dimensional symbolic devices in the first place.
― Bob Standard, Friday, 7 September 2007 23:14 (eighteen years ago)
Corrections:
1) predictabley reactionary
2) a single surprising or interesting observation
― Bob Standard, Friday, 7 September 2007 23:28 (eighteen years ago)
That's so much exactly what I feel about him, only way more articulate than I could have managed.
― James Morrison, Sunday, 9 September 2007 02:40 (eighteen years ago)