Take a photo of a barcode or cover
therealesioan 's review for:
Serotonin
by Michel Houellebecq
That line about Proust bopping to Rihanna kinda sums up the degeneration of French delicacy in it's literature. Of course the country has historically produced filth like De Sade and Sartre, but I think it's fair to say there's always been - at least in the imagination of the English speaking world - an Platonic ideal of the refined French culture. The culture of Proust, Chopin and Monet. Or better yet, a culture where all its women look like Coco Channel and Colette, and it's buildings Chartres.
Now it's nationally recognized author is Michel Houllebecq. Certainly not exoterically a man of debonair class to say the least. More a living an embodiment of the coomer meme.
Regardless, you can see his French sensibilities seeping through by the end here. Even when he's describing a protagonist in the depths of despair and alienation, he has to insert a cultured discussion of Mann's Magic Mountain and Proust and Arthur Conan Doyle. His French particularism - which all frenchmen share - expressed in appreciation of high culture creeps it's way gradually through this novel.
It's the perfect account of a decline of a civilization. Sure it doesn't have the visceral intensity of Cao Zhi's description of Luoyang after the fall of the Qin Dynasty. But it matches that and other tales in its brutal honesty.
Houllebecq really is a prophet for the state of Europe. He should be cherished (even if he looks extremely smelly and unsafe to leave around children).
Now it's nationally recognized author is Michel Houllebecq. Certainly not exoterically a man of debonair class to say the least. More a living an embodiment of the coomer meme.
Regardless, you can see his French sensibilities seeping through by the end here. Even when he's describing a protagonist in the depths of despair and alienation, he has to insert a cultured discussion of Mann's Magic Mountain and Proust and Arthur Conan Doyle. His French particularism - which all frenchmen share - expressed in appreciation of high culture creeps it's way gradually through this novel.
It's the perfect account of a decline of a civilization. Sure it doesn't have the visceral intensity of Cao Zhi's description of Luoyang after the fall of the Qin Dynasty. But it matches that and other tales in its brutal honesty.
Houllebecq really is a prophet for the state of Europe. He should be cherished (even if he looks extremely smelly and unsafe to leave around children).