The most stimulating European novelist working? A professional provocateur? A moralist disguised as a pornographer? A fake disguised as a nihilist? An awkward genius? A rabidly lucid, virulent and sardonic writer? A merciless basher of Western society? What is clear is that Michel Houellebecq leaves no one indifferent.
The reader will find gathered here his first three novels, which launched him into literary stardom and placed him at the center of controversy, where he continues to reside. All three are carried out by disoriented and resentful beings, lethargic castaways from the consumer society. The central character of Battlefield Expansion is a depressed computer engineer who has been in chastity for two years; The Elementary Particles confronts two forty-something stepbrothers: a kind of scientific monk who has renounced sexuality and a literature professor who is a compu...read more