MixedJewish CurrentsSerotonin simply tracks an existing course to its logical endpoint. A string stretched to its limit is bound to snap. Serotonin is satire only to the extent that Florent-Claude is a cartoon. We are meant to believe that he was once relatively virtuous—an attentive boyfriend, a politically pure bureaucrat, a conscious environmentalist—the implication being that society has squashed him into his current contemptible state ... It’s not that Houellebecq’s diagnosis of economic globalization gone rogue is wrong—if Serotonin reads as nostalgic for the ancien régime, that is chiefly because its class divisions were clearly demarcated, and no one was tricked into complicity with their own demise ... is a life lacking in sexual satisfaction (for men, naturally) really as ignominious as a life without sustainable living conditions?
Annie Ernaux, Trans. by Alison L. Strayer
RaveBookforum\"Ernaux’s memoir The Years, which was recently translated into English, is best understood as an account of the sociological conditions that made her previous work possible. The Years is unsentimental and distant in tone, flattening out the trajectory of Ernaux’s singular life by telling a grander narrative in which the weight of history acts upon an individual life … The result is a memoir that is humble and generous, an homage to the great French writers and thinkers of the previous century. The ‘she’ of The Years could be (and indeed is meant to be) any woman who grew up in a small town and moved into the literary world … The Years is not the testimony of a woman who once existed, but of a woman who no longer exists.\
