Product Description

In his new work, Michel Houellebecq combines erotic provocation with a terrifying vision of a world teetering between satiety and fanaticism, to create one of the most shocking, hypnotic, and intelligent novels in years.

In his early forties, Michel Renault skims through his days with as little human contact as possible. But following his father’s death he takes a group holiday to Thailand where he meets a travel agent—the shyly compelling Valérie—who begins to bring this half-dead man to life with sex of escalating intensity and audacity. Arcing with dreamlike swiftness from Paris to Pattaya Beach and from sex clubs to a terrorist massacre, Platform is a brilliant, apocalyptic masterpiece by a man who is widely regarded as one of the world’s most original and daring writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124126 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-13
• Released on: 2004-07-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Booklist
The controversial French author of The Elementary Particles (2000) turns in another unremittingly bleak novel. In addition to amplifying his views on the decadence of Western civilization, Houellebecq displays an absolutely chilling prescience in his depiction of a violent Muslim sect. Misanthropic, sexually frustrated bureaucrat Michel embarks on a "Thai Tropic" package tour, amusing himself with snide commentary on his fellow vacationers and frequent visits to sex clubs. Although he is attracted to business executive Valerie, he has trouble engaging her in small talk. However, when they return to Paris, their relationship quickly turns passionate as they explore sadomasochism and public sex. Michel talks Valerie and her business partner into marketing sex tours to the Third World, selling them on his theory that Westerners have lost touch with their own sexuality. But when they decide to sample one of their own tours, their resort becomes a flashpoint for Islamic hatred. Houellebecq is unrelenting as he meticulously constructs a world that mirrors his own cold vision and that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
?Howard Stern meets Albert Camus in this novel of sex and alienation . . . Houellebecq has sharp observations about ennui in the Western world and rage in the Muslim one.?
?Kyle Smith, People

?Astute, graceful, sexually preoccupied . . . Houellebecq rewards with glimpses through his particularly keen lens.?
?Arthur Hirsch, The Baltimore Sun

?A novel at once brilliant, charming, puzzling, annoying and sometimes downright repulsive . . . The work of a highly talented writer.?
?Jean Charbonneau, Cleveland Plain Dealer

?The talented, cynical Houellebecq blasts Western culture and Islam in his odd, subversive entertainment.?
?Carlo Wolff, The Boston Globe

?Blunt, arrogant, coolly detached, ultra-sophisticated, impeccably and simply presented, intellectually self-assured and very self-conscious . . . This is the real thing, the kind of novel that ends up in the canon.?
?Michel Basilières, The Toronto Star





From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

Review
“A terrific writer, funny and prophetic . . . feverishly alive to the world around him.” – The New York Times Book Review

“Calculated to poke, prod, engorge, enrage and amuse. . . . It’s dangerous in the way that literature is meant to be dangerous—that is, it awakens neglected sensibilities.”—The New York Observer

“Houellebecq’s writing has a raw, disquieting brilliance. . . .It’s ‘genius.’”—The Washington Post

“Brilliant, charming, puzzling, annoying and sometimes downright repulsive.” —The Denver Post

“Full, acidic, self-flagellating . . . [Platform has] earned Mr. Houellebecq the status of conversation piece, agent provocateur and savage messiah.” —The New York Times

“Remarkable . . . hilarious. . . . [Houellebecq] writes from the soul of a despairing, acutely lucid bureaucrat on Viagra.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Scaldingly honest . . . [Platform] takes no prisoners as to prevailing terms of politically correct or any-other-way-correct discourse. . . . It frequently uses jarring juxtaposition to dislocate us from complacencies, received wisdoms or even moderate comfort. . . . The analysis is broad and extremely knowledgeable . . . [with] quirky and sometimes horrific observations on everything from ecology to airport gift shops to incest. . . . Bracing.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“The most potentially weighty French novelist to emerge since Tournier. . . . The trajectory of Houellebecq’s world view will be worth following.” —The New Yorker

“An outstandingly powerful and relevant novel about sex, death, and Islam.” —Hanif Kureishi

“Astute, graceful, sexually preoccupied, occasionally alarming. . . . Eviscerat[es] the cultural moment.” —The Baltimore Sun

“The characters in Platform are detestable. . . . And the hatred [Michel] expresses . . . is loathsome. . . . But what is wrong with this? Why should literature not be as cruel as life itself? . . . This book offers us an ‘I’ we can relate to–hate, love, fear–without being pointedly obstructed by the author’s tormented cosmology. . . . Moving.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Brilliant. . . . Reads like a shot. . . . The excitement of Platform is the force with which Houellebecq says the unsayable, his determination to cut through moral equivocation.” —Salon

“[A] dirty novel of ideas. . . . Houellebecq’s sex scenes are hot and bountiful.” —Entertainment Weekly

“An extraordinary blend of pornography, satire and diatribe . . . Houellebecq is an undeniably gifted writer–I found myself reading on, even when the impulse to throw the book across the room grew strong.” —Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News

“Odd, subversive entertainment.” —The Boston Globe

“What’s at stake is the desacralizing of sex, its final leap into the realm of pure commodity, the role of implacable consumption in cultural imperialism. . . . It’s not the kind of book you only read once.” —The Village Voice

“Cynical and anomic . . . literary and complex.” –The Atlantic Monthly

“Shockingly vile and shockingly banal, written with an ear toward pissing off just about everyone. . . . Houellebecq’s novel is tough to put down no matter how much you’d like to. . . . Like good porn it’s increasingly difficult to draw your eyes away as it oozes toward climax.” —Austin Chronicle

“A work of considerable imagination and wit. Even when the reader is most repelled, he may want to view the writer with grudging admiration. . . . [Michel Renault’s rants] are very funny, and . . . very true.” —The Sunday Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ)

“Platform cuts precisely to the core of every imaginable big-picture problem facing the world. . . . Houellebecq knows how to get a rise out of his readers. . . . His prejudices are serious, and current.” —American Book Review

“Houellebecq writes with an honesty and an anomic conviction that raises his novels, beyond any single troubling moment, toward genius.” —Toronto Globe and Mail

“The most important book of the year–and perhaps of the century thus far. . . . Dazzling and prescient. . .Houellebecq [is] one of the finest novelists of ideas alive.” —Evening Standard (London)

“Brilliant. . .A thrilling read, close to Swift’s A Modest Proposal in its impact.” —Daily Telegraph (London)

“Extraordinarily good. . . Houellebecq is one of the few novelists working in any language who properly understands the tensions of the present age. He is also utterly fearless in articulating this.” —New Statesman

“Houellebecq writes with humor as sharp as a razor’s edge. There is bravery and even bravado in [his] prose. He alone among contemporary writers is prepared to do what the likes of Orwell and Huxley did and put up a mirror to our past and project its reflection on the future.” —Financial Times (London)

Customer Reviews

Great book crummy translation...as usual
The big problem with reading Houellebecq's books in English is the abysmal translations which totally undercut the unique angry funny insightful voice of this writer. The results on the page comes off as tinny, stilted & pretentious. I can only compare it to Lawence Welk doing a cover of a John Coltrane composition. Yes note for note or word for word does not convey meaning or harmony or rhythm or sense.

Welcome to the Wild and Erotic World of Michel and Valérie!
A small conceit of the English translation of Michel Houellebecq's PLATFORM is that certain words and phrases the author originally used in English are boldfaced, presumably so that readers will know that they carried a sort of extra Anglo-Saxon punch in the original text. However, the boldfaced words also recall the talent of Frank Wynne, Houellebecq's translator. I mention these words because I otherwise might not have remembered that I was reading a translated text, so clearly and accurately has Wynne rendered the author's unmistakable, inimitable voice.

With that said, this is not a voice all readers will appreciate. Protagonist and first-person narrator Michel Renault lives a small, sour existence as a middle-aged, middle-management civil servant. His Paris contains no romance and less contentment, and so he travels --- but his coldly assessing eye hardly allows him to enjoy his journeys or his arrivals. Sex in a variety of forms preoccupies him, and it is through sexual experiences that he seems to at least feel alive. While the women on his tour mainly disgust him (the young and nubile he deems "sluts"; the older and more aware he derides in various ways), women whom he can pay for sex receive the small bits of appreciation he can muster.

Still, it is a fellow tour group member, Valérie, with whom Michel connects when back in Paris. Michel, whose barely restrained anger towards his recently dead father once prevented him from pairing off with anyone besides his own hand, finds Valérie's combination of submissive generosity and high-paying job as a tourism executive irresistible. Their relationship brings him so much contentment that his boss comments that he seems happy. Despite their calm domestic bliss, the pair (both of whom seem quite addicted to orgasm) soon finds themselves drawn to more and more extreme erotic adventures.

Most of the time, PLATFORM seems more like one for Houellebecq's extreme yet articulate views than it does a novel --- yet his frozen-eyed comments on capitalism, religion, and gender politics are uncomfortably close to the secret thoughts so many people have. When Michel and Valérie devise a plan to turn her company's tours into sex holidays, they return together to the Thailand where he once experienced the zipless pleasures of a remarkably sanitary sex worker...For a moment, it seems that everyone will be happy, even Valérie's dour boss, Jean-Yves (given his straitlaced viewpoint, Houellebecq seems to say that it's no wonder his wife moonlights as a dominatrix). But alas, an early discussion Michel has with his father's housekeeper-mistress, whose Muslim honor avenged resulted in Renault pére's murder, presages the tragic end of the resort community and Michel's brief personal paradise. That this paradise is based on Western woman's supposed boredom with the all-too-familiar sex-for-love equation and the purported eagerness of Eastern woman to trade sex for the simple things (groceries, reliability, good manners) makes Houellebecq's Utopia terribly disturbing --- and terribly thought-provoking.

--- Reviewed by Bethanne Kelly Patrick

Houellebecq should write essays, not novels.
There are enough droll, incisive, hilarious observations about the sickening ironies of corporate culture and the pursuit of happiness in this book to make for a wickedly funny essay. However, the plot of the book is quite simply so unengaging, its premise so preposterous, and the characters so unidimensional, that reading it became a daily slog.
I still do not have in my mind's eye a picture of just who Valerie is, nor do I care about Jaques-Yves (or whatever his name is) for a moment. Perhaps Michel is attempting to portray the equilibrium (or lack thereof) of sexuality in the first world, but his method is tedious, uninvolving, and incredibly unconvincing.
Yet, any book with passages such as: "Happiness is a delicate thing," he announced in a sententious voice. "'It is difficult to find within ourselves, and impossible to find elsewhere.' If you reversed the words 'difficult' and 'impossible' you'd probably have been closer to the truth."
...has some wisdom in it.