Atomised

"The book tells the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno. They both had appalling childhoods and are abandoned by their hippy mother, who spends her life in communes pursuing shallow, hedonistic relationships. The premise of the book, as the title suggests, is about the disconnection between people in the technological, scientific, post-modern world, where all relationships are mangled, damaged parodies. Michel is a scientist who believes that love and family is essentially redundant given the advances of modern genetics, and that men in particular are redundant. Aldous Huxley’s nightmarish book Brave New World is the template he looks towards with actual anticipation. Michel is an ascetic who finds women repulsive on some level – he is afraid and confused by them. Bruno, on the other hand, is a sexually obsessed masturbator incapable of, or unwilling to, hold down a relationship with a woman. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . At one point, Michel writes the words “blood is thicker than water” on a piece of paper. That’s perhaps the only recognition that his relationship with his half-brother, feeble and unsatisfying as it is, is superior to any artificial bond with a woman. Certainly, the brother relationship seems to be the only one in the book that involves any form of true communication, even if it is highly intellectual and unemotional. Michel and Bruno keep in touch, and reach out to each other in some tortured way. These brothers are Houellebecq’s mouthpieces for his very French philosophising. There may be love here, but it is suppressed to look more like desperation or habit. Atomised is an important book, if only for its determination to break taboos – the hatred of women of both Bruno and Michel is apparent – but it is not important for its portrayal of brotherhood. There, perhaps, it is typical. The brother relationship, as is so often the case in literature, is seen as relatively trivial if by necessity long-lived. Absolutely. The book was apparently semi-autobiographical. There’s a great press quote from Houellebecq’s mother Lucie Ceccaldi, who wrote an autobiography in rebuttal called The Innocent One , saying of her son: “If he has the misfortune of sticking my name on anything again, he will get my walking stick in his face and I’ll knock his teeth out.”"