Serotonin
-
-
3.8 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- £4.99
-
- £4.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2020
A powerful criticism of modern life by one of the most provocative and prophetic writers of our age
Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain's release of serotonin.
When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return towhat they remember as a golden age.
'Despite its provocations, this is a novel of romantic and sorrowful ideas: Houellebecq as troubadour, singing lost loves' Rachel Kushner
Michel Houellebecq has good claim to be the most interesting novelist of our times. . . Exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable' Evening Standard
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his latest provocation, Houellebecq (Submission) brilliantly pokes at modern questions of free trade, social decline, and overmedication, while continually undermining the work with puerile sequences that have little to do with the plot. Florent-Claude Labrouste is an aging, chain-smoking Ministry of Agriculture employee based in Paris. After a brief interlude in Spain, he realizes that he despises his live-in girlfriend, Yuzu. Shortly after, he also discovers that she has been in a sequence of gang-bang videos (one involving dogs) and decides to vanish. Labrouste quits his job, takes up residence in a hotel, and starts taking a pill for his depression, one that kills his libido. Suddenly emboldened, he goes back to the Normandy of his youth in search of his lost love, Camille. There, he lives with his old friend Aymeric, a depressed dairy farmer struggling against E.U. quotas. The farmers arm themselves, and a violent denouement looms. Along the way there is a bizarre child pornography sequence that seems to exist mainly to perpetuate Houellebecq's long-standing enfant terrible reputation. And yet, despite so much that alienates (Labrouste's causal racist and sexist remarks pepper the book), Houellebecq is a seductive, talented writer, and he remains strangely prophetic about current issues (in this case, protests against free trade). The result is an unexpected page-turner about the dairy trade.
