Daniel25
... I now had good mastery of the workings of my rifles, I was able to reload very quickly, and I could have massacred them. The doubts that had occasionally, throughout my abstract and solitary life, assailed me, had now disappeared: I knew that I was dealing with baleful, unhappy and cruel creatures; it was not among them that i would find love, or its possibility, nor any of the ideals that fuelled the daydreams of our human predecessors; they were only the caricature-like residues of the worst tendencies of ordinary mankind, the kind that Daniel1 knew already, the one whose death he had wished for, planned, and to a large extent accomplished.
I've been reading The Possibility of an Island for a while, although I had to break off to read something else a couple of times because the mood was so wrong. I finished it tonight. It's the novel from which the eponymous film (see earlier review) was adapted by its author, Michel Houellebecq.
Having read its source material, the sometimes mysterious scenes of the film are largely explained, and it's also shown to be a lesser, failed rendition. The odd retro-pastiche visuals of the film are not reflected in the book, which is identifiably Houellebecq and not an homage.
In my review of the film I claimed the "island" of the title to be "an isolated mind or a utopia", whereas the book reveals it to have been intended to be the "annihilation" (as it repeatedly termed) of a perfect love, or of the idea of a perfect love, from which the main protagonist Daniel1 cannot escape and into which his limbically attenuated plant-hybrid clone descendant, Daniel25, cannot enter.
I've read two Houellebecq novels this year - this and Atomised. Though I'm not at all sure I enjoy him as a writer, there is this slightly unpleasant, though not grotesque something which animates his work: a momentarily compelling, universal quality that seeks to convince of its explanatory potential, before it has finally to be rejected.
I've been reading The Possibility of an Island for a while, although I had to break off to read something else a couple of times because the mood was so wrong. I finished it tonight. It's the novel from which the eponymous film (see earlier review) was adapted by its author, Michel Houellebecq.
Having read its source material, the sometimes mysterious scenes of the film are largely explained, and it's also shown to be a lesser, failed rendition. The odd retro-pastiche visuals of the film are not reflected in the book, which is identifiably Houellebecq and not an homage.
In my review of the film I claimed the "island" of the title to be "an isolated mind or a utopia", whereas the book reveals it to have been intended to be the "annihilation" (as it repeatedly termed) of a perfect love, or of the idea of a perfect love, from which the main protagonist Daniel1 cannot escape and into which his limbically attenuated plant-hybrid clone descendant, Daniel25, cannot enter.
I've read two Houellebecq novels this year - this and Atomised. Though I'm not at all sure I enjoy him as a writer, there is this slightly unpleasant, though not grotesque something which animates his work: a momentarily compelling, universal quality that seeks to convince of its explanatory potential, before it has finally to be rejected.