His fiction is brainier, trickier and more stimulating than his polarizing reputation suggests ... Slow getting started and too diffuse by half — I began skipping the boring dream sequences ... Houellebecq is such a sly and ambiguous writer that I’m not always sure when he’s kidding. I often identify with his characters, and even when I find certain pages repellent, Houellebecq challenges my perceptions. He gets me asking whether I’m in touch with my real self, or whether I’ve unthinkingly donned a set of attitudes passed on by our culture.
Houellebecq doesn’t just forecast current events; he satirizes them, dryly, with perfect pitch ... Houellebecq ambles through Paul’s and Bruno’s bell-jar lives and political maneuverings at a languorous pace, but enlivens the narrative with irrupting counternarratives ... Ponders and meanders ... I trust his sarcasm, more than his mysticism, to free us.
It gets off to a slow start, so slow that I debated abandoning my copy on a subway seat so that it could depress another passenger. That seemed cruel and random, so I hung on and finished it ... Tedious and disengaged ... Slack ... As if Houellebecq’s heart were not in it. There are many failed epigrams. He’s an arsonist who has lost his matches.
Gripping ... Bleak ... No part of life stops to give way to any other part. Some questions are solved, some go unanswered, and some will not find their answers until the day after you die.
I find little fault ... A novel that is brutally personal while having a larger political sweep ... Is Houellebecq good enough to love despite his politics? Even with the politics distracting on the page, Annihilation is a novel whose excellence I struggle to deny.
An occult-steeped pulp mystery, a political thriller centred on deepfakes and cyber-attacks as well everyday tragedy in the shape of grave medical emergencies ... The plot’s wild twists and turns compete for the reader’s interest with Houellebecq’s usual grandstanding on culture and society ... The way the novel keeps drilling down remorselessly into desire and aspiration as a matter of sex and shelter can’t help but be funny, and after all these years there’s still a tang to Houellebecq’s bluntness, for good and ill. When the unexpectedly emotional denouement sees Paul decide that he’d rather die than cut out his tongue, I don’t think we need to squint too hard to see a symbol for the author himself.
A lengthy novel, and Houellebecq labours to make it feel longer. The colour palette is overwhelmingly grey ... Like most of Houellebecq’s work, though, the book sharpens as it advances. Annihilation may present itself as a political thriller, but at its heart is a far more intimate catastrophe ... Leans neither towards hope nor despair, but towards a transcendent serenity – an eerie peace that arises, as everything arises in this novel, in the space to which warring forces give shape.
While Houellebecq has always been a great dramatist, Annihilation is weighed down by superfluous dream sequences ... Feels like a minor work: not quite angry enough, uncommitted to its grand political thriller plot, anticlimactic, and dismissive of its female characters for reasons that feel more pathological than subversive.
A compassionate, deeply affecting novel about love and death and the way we treat the dying ... For those dismissive of Houellebecq as merely scabrous and reprehensible, the themes of this novel may be surprising ... Far from faultless.
Houellebecq tells uncomfortable but enlightening truths about the heterosexual male mind ... Two love plots develop. Both are surprising, and quite moving ... Nothing if not realistic.
