Serotonin - Tapa dura

"Michel Houellebecq has good claim to be the most interesting novelist of our times ... Houellebecq has often shown alarming prescience in his fiction ... The novel burns with anger ... Cutting between brand names and sweeping generalisations, exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable ... Yet the anger he expresses here about the destruction of the deep France that he loves could not be more to the point, reflecting deep despair about what is happening now. There’s no British equivalent to Houellebecq. After years of being shunned by the French establishment, he has now been fully embraced by it. On New Year’s Day, he was awarded the Légion d’honneur. Just so." (Evening Standard)

"Every few years, Michel Houellebecq takes his literary scalpel to French society. It usually hurts, often shocks, and always causes a commotion ... There is no equivalent in France to the arrival of a new Houellebecq novel ... The novelist’s wit, and skill at shifting from the banal quotidian to the existential, are intact ... Mr Houellebecq has once again managed to put his finger on modern French (and Western) society’s wounds, and it hurts." (Economist)

"Houellebecq is a deeply political novelist – he has said he never votes in elections, only in referendums – and Sérotonine reflects his country's present discontents ... It is revelatory how much French critics praised the book. They clearly regarded Houellebecq's implicit denunciation of the French establishment, French society and the EU as utterly accurate. If your French is up to it, do read this remarkable novel – even though parts require a strong stomach – because Houellebecq is a remarkable stylist. If not, let's hope the translation does him justice." (Simon Heffer Daily Telegraph)

"Not many readers will necessarily embrace Houellebecq’s world view. That, I would firmly suggest, is beside the point. As Howard Jacobson once put it: “Encountering what is not you, indeed what might well be inimical to you, is one of the first reasons for reading anything.” If you have not read Houellebecq before ― and don’t insist on virtuous literature ― the thrill of heresy that the novel offers could well be enough, with plenty of admittedly rather bracing material to enjoy or argue with." (Times)

THE MOST IMPORTANT FRENCH BOOK OF THE YEAR
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'One cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature without reading Houellebecq's work.' Karl Ove Knausgaard, New York Times

Dissatisfied and discontent, Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is dying of sadness. His young girlfriend hates him and his career as an engineer at the Ministry of Agriculture is pretty much over. His only relief comes in the form of a pill – white, oval, small. Recently released for public consumption, Captorix is a new brand of anti-depressant which works by altering the brain’s release of serotonin.

Armed with this new drug, Labrouste decides to abandon his life in Paris and return to the Normandy countryside where he used to work promoting regional cheeses, and where he had once been in love. But instead of happiness, he finds a rural community devastated by globalisation and European agricultural policies, and local farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an impossible return to what they remember as the golden age.

Written by one of the most provocative and prophetic novelists of his generation, Serotonin is at once a devastating story of solitude, longing and individual suffering, and a powerful criticism of modern life.