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OverviewJust thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until, that is, he's packed off with a colleague - the unimaginably ugly, sexually-frustrated virgin Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system. A painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Michel Houellebecq, Won Prix Goncourt in 2010 for The Map and the Territory , Paul HammondPublisher: Profile Books Ltd Imprint: Serpent's Tail Edition: Main Dimensions: Width: 12.80cm , Height: 1.00cm , Length: 19.70cm Weight: 0.115kg ISBN: 9781852425845ISBN 10: 1852425849 Pages: 160 Publication Date: 14 January 1999 Audience: General/trade , General Replaced By: 9781846687846 Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Out of Print Availability: Awaiting stock Table of ContentsReviewsThe 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 -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian * The mischief-making enfant terrible of new-wave French fiction * Independent * Le grand fromage du jour * The Face * It could well turn out to be a cult here too... Astonishing * Time Out * 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 * Literary Review * Funny, terrifying and nauseating * Independent * This boy needs serious therapy. He may be beyond help * Washington Post * Another highly regarded (and prizewinning) French novel, this 1995 confection delineates the ennui-laden adventures of its unnamed narrator, a disaffected computer expert sent with a colleague from Paris to the provinces, to instruct civil servants in the use of new technology. He has lost interest in sex, has a heart problem (!), spends his free time composing limp anthropomorphic fantasies, and shrugs off passivity - only to encourage his suggestible companion Bernard to murder one of the many women who have rejected him. That spark of malicious energy aside, he's a nondescript bore. So is Houellebecq's (really tedious) first novel. (Kirkus Reviews) A massive success in France, Whatever displays a stylish disaffection with IT society. Its narrator is a computer programmer whose caustic contempt for life is a reaction to, rather than a existential rage against, the machine. Broken down by a gradually crushing boredom, his only release is writing very weird animal stories that reflect his disturbed psyche. This jaded attitude to late-20th-century urban society is US slacker philosophy, Gallic-style. Witty, literate and direct, it bravely attempts to isolate the cause of the 'slacker philosophy' malaise. (Kirkus UK) Author InformationNovelist 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. His literary career began when, at twenty, he started to move in poetic circles in France. Whatever, Houellebecq s first novel, has been translated into several languages. A novel of darkness and despair, it is, at the same time, full of humour. In 1998, he received the prestigious Grand Prix National des Lettres Jeunes Talents for the entirety of his literary output. He has also won the Prix Novembre (for Atomised). In the spring of 2000 saw the debut of his first album, Presence humaine, where he sings a number of his poems to the music of Bertrand Burgalat. He currently lives in Ireland. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |