Omschrijving
A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague - the sexually-frustrated Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system.
Funny, terrifying and nauseating
The balance between philosophy and narrative detail is perfectly judged; the book slips down easily like a bad oyster. As is the nature of such things, it is grimly comic
Le grand fromage du jour
It could well turn out to be a cult here too ... astonishing
Snappy, bite-sized, and often very funny. Is it European exhaustion? Is it the soul of man under late capitalism? Millenial gloom? Post-Christian despair? Is it the death of love? Whatever. But Houellebecq describes it perfectly
This boy needs serious therapy. He may be beyond help
The mischief-making enfant terrible of new-wave French fiction
Houellebecq captures precisely the cynical disillusionment of disaffected youth
Novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq was born in 1958, on the French island of Reunion. At the age of six, Michel was given over to the care of his paternal grandmother, a communist, whose family name he later adopted. Houellebecq has won many prizes, including the Prix Flore in 1996, the Grand Prix National des Lettres Jeunes Talents in 1998, the Prix Novembre and, most recently, the Prix Goncourt in 2010. His first album, Presence Humaine, was released in 2000. He currently lives in Spain.