PositiveFull Stop... a novel approach to acquiring, representing, and thinking about knowledge. I am not sure if there is a general expectation that stories in a collection will be in conversation with one another, but Fraia’s are. And if I may be audacious, I think their connective tissue can be summed up with one word: epistemology. But that word is also a question ... There is something anti-story in every story, where the force pushing towards narrative resolution (or at least compromise) is challenged by a slightly ethereal centrifugal drift which slows, and maybe even reverses, that centripetal approach ... The third and final story, \'August,\' is the best and quite excellent. It also is easily the most Russian—making good on the promise of the book’s title.
Michel Houellebecq, Trans. by Shaun Whiteside
MixedFull StopSerotonin is Houellebecq’s most direct book, which is perhaps another way of saying it is his least artistic, dragging at times not because it is cynical (though it surely is) but because it is reductive (Eros and Thanatos) and pedantic ... Celine is the focus of the book’s strongest sections, in which the existential edge remains but is scrutinized in light of the unreasonable power of their love, creating stylistic, narrative, and philosophical tension ... convergence with the intellectual mainstream, and his own self-imitating tendencies, have not crowded out what makes Houellebecq unique. His aloof intensity remains paradoxical, provocative, and singular, the atrophy-inducing alienation of someone who has intellectually absconded from everything human while somehow remaining attuned to the redemptive nature of something he believes can no longer exist: an interpersonal relationship uncorrupted by a culture fundamentally hostile to insular and individualized intimacy. Yet, as can happen with a great writer, Houellebecq’s art overrides his diagnoses. He cannot help it.
