An 18-rated review of an 18-rated book. If you don’t want to read about the gory details of fleshy entangulations and of bodily fluid by the bucketful, then you need to steer well clear of M. Houellebecq. He’s all about that. The sex is like the worst kind of bad cartoon porn and we can’t possibly be meant to take it seriously. I don’t really know what it’s doing in here. He’s trying to make a serious or black-comedy ironic point about the state of first world/third world relationships and how everyone could be made happier if we only just lightened up about sex tourism. And he scuppers his own novel because he includes this stuff :(Michel – that’s the protagonist, yes, same name as the novelist, and his brilliant girlfriend Valerie are out on the town in Paris. Now read on!)It was a Saturday night, the place was quite full. We met a really nice black couple; she was a nurse and he was a jazz drummer. …[three sentences later] We finished our drinks and headed up to the rooms. He suggested a double penetration to Valerie. She agreed, as long as I was the one to sodomise her.So the two guys do the two girls and I must admit I lolled at this :Everything went smoothly, I was agreeably surprised by my own stamina.Well, bien sur, mon ami, that’s what happens in porn. The sex is always stratospheric, the orgasms always geyser forth like an Icelandic hot spring, and everyone is able to have about five or six per hour, the gentlemen’s members are always like several iron bars welded together, they never ever suffer from erectile dysfunction, and the girls always regard what comes out of the end of them like normal people regard a glass of Vosne-Romanee burgundy, the girls are always gagging to have everything shoved everywhere, and they always want to do it again ten minutes later, and no one has any diseases.So Michel and Valerie’s evening struck me as a little unlikely, but maybe I should get out more. Or not, of course.A few pages before that, they were in Cuba on holiday having sex in their hotel room, and they’ve left the curtains open. A maid sees them.Valerie got up, walked towards her, and held out her hands. And that’s all it takes – the maid is young, gorgeous, and completely into the idea of a threesome at the drop of a broom. Mais bien sur, again. She’s not 52, varicose-veined and asthmatic. Well, this is all ridiculous French Swingers A-Go-Go, and it makes it Platform a very silly novel indeed.This novel is about sex tourism and never mentions drugs, or the miserable lives of the sex workers. In fact, all the sex workers are happy hookers who are glad to be able to work that thing to bring joy to the face of whatever potbellied manbreasted Western male they are lucky enough to have copped off with. I should say that this did not make Platform resound with believability for me.Anyway, in Platform we get the narrative of a disenchanted loner who goes on a sex holiday to Thailand and hooks up with one of his fellow tourists Valerie and falls in love. And they have great and plentiful sex (see above). He’s in his 40s, she’s 28 with a cleavage to drown in and she likes girls too. Naturellement! So this is standard male fantasy territory (in porn and in Hollywood, all males over the age of 40 are able to captivate a knockout girl in her 20s. Also in arty movies, same thing. Look at all Woody Allen movies. I saw Manhattan recently - in that a late 30s Woody is sleeping with Marielle Hemingway who is 17. Sorry, I digress). Added to that, and given equal prominence, is a steady stream of piquant miserablist ruminations on the state of life in the West. I cannot deny, these are hysterical. Men live alongside one another like cattle; it is a miracle if once in a while they manage to share a bottle of booze.It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.In most circumstances of my life, I have had about as much freedom as a vacuum cleaner.Gradually everything becomes too difficult : that’s what life comes down to.When all’s said and done, the idea of the uniqueness of the individual is nothing more than pompous absurdity.Anything can happen in life, especially nothing. And, the aphorism which seems to sum up MH’s jeremiad pretty well :We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what’s more, we continue to export it. Anyway, MH-the-protagonist goes on at length about how in the West we all run around working like mad and making money and in the process becoming so exhausted that sex – never mind love – becomes far too much trouble. We’ve become so picky and self-centred we wouldn’t dream of devoting ourselves to the pleasure of others, even for 15 minutes. So we have money but we’re miserable, because we still want the sex and the affection. Therefore, we should all – men and women – go to Thailand for 2 weeks every year. There the natives have nothing except their extremely attractive bodies. They love nothing more than to devote their entire working lives to making you – yes you! come on, no false modesty please – achieve the kind of orgasms you never knew were possible. You know you want to!To sum up the rest of the novel – “and we’d have gotten away with it too, ifn it weren’t for them pesky Muslim terrorists!”This was a fun novel to read – it was so odd, so ridiculous, so pompous, so off the scale unrealistic, so almost-racist, so insulting to all and sundry including specific Frederick Forsyth and John Grisham novels (he takes a page or so to slag off these books, quoting from them without any acknowledgement anywhere), so downbeat and so raving mad that I should give it 3 stars, except that it really is almost complete rubbish.
Platform, yet another brilliant Houellebecq novel, is really just a warm up for The Possibility of an Island and The Map and the Territory. As such, it provides a nice overview of - or, if you prefer - "platform" for his philosophy.And MH is a philosophical novelist, not the sexist and transgressive novelist whom many critics make him out to be.Because I don't have a lot of time right now, I'm just going to provide a quotation from the end of Platform, one that I hope will interest you enough to have you pick up the book for yourself. The main narrator, Michel, writes about his deceased lover Valérie:"She was one of those creatures who are capable of devoting their lives to someone else's happiness, of making that alone their goal. This phenomenon is a mystery. Happiness, simplicity, and joy lie within them, but I still do not know how or why it occurs. And if I haven't understood love, what use is it to me to have understood the rest?"To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the west, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism, and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it."This is one of the harshest condemnations of the capitalist system that I've ever read. MH, like Blake, wants us to dream up new systems to get beyond those that we westerners have created. It's unfortunate - but possibly true, as MH reiterates in his novels - that these new systems may very well be nightmares, and, instead, we should do our very best to find and BE people who are "capable of devoting [our or] their lives to someone else's happiness."Read Michel Houellebecq - please.
What do You think about Platform (2004)?
I just finished this, and I'm not sure of what I think and how many stars to give...What bothers me the most is his vulgarism and literally - pornography (he could write sex scenes in much more subtle way) and mostly because of this I didn't gave 4 stars.This book is very well-written (except for the dirty sex scenes that I didn't like), and full of brilliant insights of global politics, economics, sex-tourism, politics and religions, the nature of the individual, the meaning of life.... A very subtle and cynical story of loneliness in these modern times, critique of what is wrong with the Western world today. I must agree with many of his views! "I had an inkling that, more and more, the whole world would come to resemble an airport." "We remember our lives, Schopenhauer wrote somewhere, as little better than a novel we once read. That’s about right: a little, no more." "I don't subscribe to the theory that we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult." "People drag their progeny around with them like a ball and chain, like some terrible deadweight that hinders their every move - and that, as often as not, effectively winds up killing them." "For the manipulative masochists, it is not enough that he is unhappy; everyone else must be unhappy too." "Culture seemed to me to be a necessary compensation for the misery of our lives. It was possible to imagine a different sort of culture, one bound up with celebration and lyricism, something that sprang from a state of happiness." "She was one of those creatures who are capable of devoting their lives to someone else's happiness, of making that alone their goal. This phenomenon is a mystery. Happiness, simplicity, and joy lie within them, but I still do not know how or why it occurs. And if I haven't understood love, what use is it to me to have understood the rest?"
—Jasminka
I just finished this today, reading outside by a corporate fountain on pine street. Fitting considering the book is a brilliant commentary on the intersection of globalization and sexualtiy, or what's left of sensuality in western culture. Houellebecq loves a good disaffected misanthrope and sometimes it's hard to follow an unreliable narrator who's got such a pessimistic worldview but this book really opens up. I didn't get annoyed with the characters the way I did through most of The Elementary Particles. It's one of the first books I've read in a long long while that 20 pages from the end I still had no idea how things were going to wrap up. Also--this has some excellent naughty bits. Perfect for subversive early morning subway reading!
—Jane
O yes! Houellebecq, be my guide and saviour! Typical stuff for Houellebecq, modern day society is all about the economic struggle and / or the sexual struggle. Pick one. Most of Houellebecq's characters fail in either or both of these struggles, can't handle the pressure, then turn to self destructive behaviour. Or, they are highly successful in one or both of these struggles, can't handle the pressure, then turn to self descructive behaviour. I love it.I would like to refer to my friend Jean's review, who puts it very accurately http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/.... I think the reason why Houellebecq's characters don't feel sympathetic is that, whereas usually a character would feel remorse or regret about his dark sides, Houellebecq's characters feel absolutely nothing. Filling in a form as a government officer to subsidise an artist exhibition is described and experienced in exactly the same way as the same guy visiting a Thai prostitute as a tourist. That's tough and hard to handle for our conditioned Western minds.One small difference between me and my friend's opinion: I love the bleak atmosphere in the book. O, and I like the violence. Of course. Houellebecq's violence has got a very Japanese horror movie feel to it (watch Ichi The Killer to see what I mean). It comes sudden, unannounced and is completely over the top.Life, love, regret, die.
—Arjen
