Around the World in 80 Books discussion

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Summary (Goodreads)

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time.

A painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life.

About the author

Michel Houellebecq (born Michel Thomas), born 26 February 1958 (birth certificate) or 1956 on the French island of Réunion, is a controversial and award-winning French novelist. To admirers he is a writer in the tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire; to detractors he is a peddler of sleaze and shock. Having written poetry and a biography of the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, he brought out his first novel Extension du domaine de la lutte in 1994. Les particules élémentaires followed in 1998 and Plateform , in 2001. After a disastrous publicity tour for this book, which led to his being taken to court for inciting racial hatred, he went to Ireland to write.

Michel Houellebecq won France's top literary award, the Goncourt Prize, for his book The Map and the Territory in 2010.

He currently lives in Spain.

I tried, I truly tried to enjoy this book. Didn't get there. I rated it 2.

I agree, Jean. I did not enjoy the book either. It started with promise, but I find I disliked the protagonist more and more as the book progressed. The misogyny was more than I could tolerate.