This is from the author of Atomised, which is apparently slap yourself stupid fantastic.  Where I can, I try to read the book after the one that made an author famous as I am interested in new writers but I have an allergy to hype.  I refused Firefly and Battlestar Galactica for months/years because of how hyped-up they were, coming around to them in my own time and finding that the hype was well warranted in the end.

So, Houellebecq.  He’s clever, I’ll give him that, and has a style that very much speaks of an intellectual scrap-booker as he pulls in insightful little thoughts and titbits from all corners.  The story here is about a stand-up comedian who is sort of reincarnated in a dystopia future where his only friend is a cloned dog, and he hates the sound of laughing.  I expected it to be searing and brilliant.  What I found was that it was almost impenetrable with a character that couldn’t be emotionally latched onto.  I forced myself through a few chapters a night and, shamefully, gave up up on it entirely after 70 pages.

I haven’t given up on many books, but I simply wasn’t getting anything out of this aside from frustration that I wasn’t reading something else.

Nevermind.  They can’t all be winners.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 6:06 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.