here<\/a><\/span> or through your local independent bookstore or library<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n\u201cThis book is dedicated to mankind.\u201d Thus ends Michel Houellebecq\u2019s strange novel The Elementary Particles<\/em>, a story about, among other things, half-brothers, France, molecular biology, sex, and morality. Translated beautifully from the French by Frank Wynne and spanning a century, the book focuses mostly on the sad, lonely lives of Michel and Bruno Djerzinski as they each pursue their passion\u2014in Michel\u2019s case, it\u2019s understanding mutations and sexual reproduction; while for Bruno, it\u2019s satisfying his seemingly unlimited sexual desire. While neither one is able to have a long-term, stable romantic relationship, they do eventually find women who accept them as they are, though that happens when all are much older.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMichel, the younger half-brother, finds that he is unable to experience romantic love, despite being close for many years with a girl who lives in his village. Annabelle waits for Michel to express affection, but when he doesn\u2019t, they drift apart, with Michel embarking on a career in molecular biology. His success in academia is paired with a lonely existence, in which he doesn\u2019t feel much of anything, except lingering affection for the grandmother who raised him. As a biographer writes of him many years after Michel\u2019s disappearance\/death, \u201cone of the marks of Djerzinki\u2019s genius\u2026 was his ability to go beyond his first intuition that sexual reproduction was, in itself, a source of deleterious mutations…[he] understood it was necessary to look past the framework of sexual reproduction to study the general topological conditions of cell division\u201d (136).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This scientific, detached study of sex is reflected in Bruno\u2019s experiences with women, in which sex is described in a monotonous narrative voice and body parts in great detail. The narrator connects what we see as an almost desperate promiscuity with the general dissolution of morality in Western society starting in the 1970s. Sex has become reduced to an exchange and empty pleasure, with relationships breaking down in the absence of real human connection. It is Michel, ironically, who is able to \u201csolve\u201d this problem when he flees France for Ireland and engages in in-depth research into sexual reproduction. Michel figures out that \u201cany genetic code, however complex, could be noted in a standard, structurally stable form, isolated from disturbances or mutations.\u201d Thus, \u201cevery animal species, however highly evolved, could be transformed into a similar species reproduced by cloning, and immortal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is what the narrator calls a \u201cmetaphysical mutation\u201d–one of the few that has happened so far in human history. And yet, as the ending of the book explains, human history has nearly ended already (in the 2070s). The narrator is a member of this new species, which doesn\u2019t experience the pain or pleasure that humanity did, but that lives in what humans think is a \u201cparadise\u201d (the narrator doesn\u2019t comment on this). Humans are dying out, having replaced themselves via science and technology. Genetic differences have been erased, everyone lives together peacefully\u2014it makes one think about Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/em>, which the brothers discuss in the middle of the book. As Bruno says, people claim that Huxley\u2019s book is a dystopian nightmare but, according to Bruno, it\u2019s actually what everyone is striving toward. The ending of the book, where the reader realizes that the narrator isn\u2019t, in fact, human, is unsettling. For this reader, fewer pages given to Bruno\u2019s sexual experiences and more given to Michel\u2019s breakthrough would have made the book more interesting and less uneven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"translated by Frank Wynne original publication (in French): 1998 first English edition: 2000 grab a copy here or through your local independent bookstore or library \u201cThis book is dedicated to mankind.\u201d Thus ends Michel Houellebecq\u2019s strange novel The Elementary Particles, a story about, among other things, half-brothers, France, molecular biology, sex, and morality. Translated beautifully<\/p>\n
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