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Article: Michel Houellebecq. The Possibility of an Island.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Review of Contemporary Fiction
- Article date:
- March 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Review of Contemporary Fiction. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Michel Houellebecq. The Possibility of an Island. Trans. Gavin Bowd. Knopf, 2006. 337 pp. $24.95.
Like its acclaimed predecessor The Elementary Particles (1998), Michel Houellebecq's latest novel projects an evolutionary future in which homo sapiens have been surpassed. The seeds of that future lie in a series of events witnessed by Daniel--a misanthropic, iconoclastic, and world-famous comedian on the brink of old age and sexual decline. As with Houellebecq's other narrators, Daniel's story reads like a reductio ad absurdum of Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Freud. Life for him revolves entirely around sex: "All energy is of a sexual nature, not mainly, but ...