Product Description

Bored with his job, his life, and the people he works with, this book's narrator is charged with bringing the delights of modern technology into people's lives. His life constantly eludes him, fading into a space into a space lacking even the energy to commit suicide.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50534 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Michel Houellebecq's book Whatever was a smash hit in his native France and has already gained him a cult following here. A funny, sometimes bitter, modern existentialist fable Whatever truly seems to capture the zeitgeist. Whilst his next novel Atomised showcases greater sophistication and is certainly more complex and reaching, Whatever remains a brisker, more distilled affair.

Houellebecq's clarity of style is often remarked upon and the translation does a mostly decent job of conveying, in short chapters, in a fairly staccato book, his distaste for modern life. The narrator of the novel is young (just 30), well paid (computers!) and without a love life--not a geek, nor particularly a social inadequate, rather someone who just doesn't connect. He writes strange, allegorical animal stories; is a clumsy philosophical dilettante; and finds himself bored, overly self-aware and analytical, unable to settle and settle for his life. Then he is told to go on a extended work trip training provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system accompanied by the extremely ugly Raphael Tisserand. Throughout the novel, the cheapening of sex and intimate relationships through commodification and modern communication technology is contemplated, but the interrogation remains relatively uncommitted; the attacks on psychoanalysis come thick and fast, seem more personal and often find their target.

Houellebecq does do a good job here of exemplifying the cul-de-sac that bored intelligence often finds itself languishing in. The trouble with this as a stratagem for a novel is that the reader is in danger of caring as little for the book as the characters do for their lives; this tightrope is better walked by writers such as Beckett or even Brett Easton Ellis and navigated more successfully by Houellebecq himself in his next novel. Indeed in many ways Whatever seems like a dress rehearsal for Atomised with similar characters imbued with the same concerns, the same post nouvelle-philosophes ennui running throughout. But it is a dress rehearsal worth attending: there is more than enough clever writing here, with its mordant articulation of a very particular kind of modern unhappiness, to consider it a success. --Mark Thwaite

Review
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)

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)

Independent
‘Houellebecq, the mischief-making enfant terrible of new-wave French fiction... Funny, terrifying and nauseating’

Customer Reviews

engaging early novel, very poorly translated
One wonders about the relation between MH and his narrator in this novel, his first I believe. It is endearing in its lumpy mix of sweepingly aggressive disillusion and undisguised lostness, and alternation of insightful compassion and callousness vis-a-vis others.
But the translation is pretty abysmal, not just clumsy and unidiomatic but at times apparently just wrong: "...to forestall an eventual surprise attack" - isn't that "eventuel", meaning, roughly, "possible" (p.58)? Other times he uses words that exist in English but are not everyday as their French counterparts are, as in the "prolongation of the jetty that seals off the port" (p. 106).
This would be ok if the narrator were supposed to be someone who spoke his own language oddly or stiltedly, but I don't think that's the idea.
The novel remains enjoyable even through this tone-deaf rendition, though. As to what it's about, it's about a guy having an increasingly terrible time and trying to explain to himself what the problem is. He fails, inevitably, has a breakdown and rides off into the sunset (on his bike).

Disappointing . . .
I bought this book on the strength of Hoeullebecq's very brilliant Atomised. Unfortunately, it did not live up to expectations. I'm not even sure what this book was about. The narrator, a sad, depressed 30-year-old computer nerd, spent most of his time in an agitated state of boredom. I had no sympathy for him at all. If Houellebecq was trying to make some kind of statement about modern day life, it was either too subtle for me to grasp or too profound for me to identify. His dejected cast of characters, drifting through life with no sense of purpose, were so emotionally detached from everything around them that I found myself just as emotionally detached reading about their exploits. Despite this, the book does offer small glimmers of Houellebecq's genius which comes to the fore in his following novel, Atomised, a book I recommend highly.

Real...Life...Is It?
The reader is given the dubious treat of being invited into the thoughts and life of a young computor programmer as he approaches a mental breakdown.- Can we, the reader, withstand the pain for long enough to gain some insights?
At the end of this read you may be asking yourself: Is the modern world, and it's social interactions essentially fake, and therefore, totally lacking in love, real warmth and affection?- Are we constrained beyond tolerance to a life of sham?-Do we fail, totally, to communicate?-Do women, in particular, deserve retribution for their continued failure to love, succour and nourish?- and, do we need a modern prophet to take us by the scruff of the neck and tell it to us like it really is, thereby, hopefully, saving us,(or,particularly,to die trying), thereby,probably, saving us.
This is a good, aggressive, distressing and thought-provoking read. - The humour in it, is like sharing a laugh in the looney bin.