an editorial In Marianne , Jacques Julliard proposed previously three possible scenarios for the France: the decline irrevocable, the transformation to the amusement park and gasping at the Charles de Gaulle airport. In the Map and The Territory , a novel almost appeased, Michel Houellebecq seemed to choose quietly to the second hypothesis.
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Eight years later, nothing is arranged, and the writer paints a France that falls. In Serotonin , his seventh novel, the decay of Florent-Claude Labrouste, the narrator, born in the vicinity of the first oil shock, accompanied by the fall of the “dear and old country,” in the great nowhere of capitalism total.
“Serotonin, it is the story of a man who had everything to be an alpha male become a zombie like the others”
The story starts off pretty lazily. The first hundred pages, Houellebecq makes Houellebecq, with great reinforcement of the “big German”, “old fags”, pornography, and middle-class made poor by the crisis. Serotonin , it is the story of a man who had everything to be an alpha male become a zombie like the others. Agricultural engineer, Florent-Claude Labrouste was a situation, money and sexual ability apparently satisfactory.
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At the age of 46, he had come young to the old-age and key in the term of its existence. The amorous adventures of his life that it made the story have all resulted in a failure. He has tried everything, yet. Maybe too much, so that the key is to dare to choose — choose to love. It is, unfortunately preview is too late. “The outside world was harsh, unforgiving to the weak, he was almost never on his promises, and love was the only thing in which we could, perhaps, have faith.”
In Normandy, a land to which attaches it to the memory of a romance bousillée with Camille, Florent-Claude finds Aymeric d’harcourt-Olonde, an aristocrat who has chosen to share the existence of farmers who are living in a “distress more and more acute”. These people endure: the agronomist who has seen the “triumph and the free-swinging” and the “race for productivity” is well placed to know. But Aymeric wants to believe that for the heads of bishops and the military as his own, the important thing is to never surrender.
“christian Knight”
While Florent-Claude were dying, he takes his rifle, brings out the ban and rear-ban farmers in the Manche and Calvados and improvises a jacquerie of a kind a little special “at the intersection of the branch of the A132 from Deauville and the A13 Caen-Paris”. Shots fire in the grove: wonderful pages 252 to 263! The death of Aymeric “christian knight” causes a feeling of pride at his friend and yet indifferent to many things: “He was dead the weapons in hand to protect the peasantry in the French, which had always been the mission of the nobility.”
Michel Houellebecq is definitely capable of anything. A swinger partys on the island of the City to a chouannerie in Normandy, he varies the moods. He is a pig, but its truffles sparkle. Don’t speak too soon of nihilism. Listen see. Serotonin ends with the same word as the monologue of Molly Bloom, in Ulysses Joyce: “Yes.”
