Platform

This is an ugly novel about nasty people written by a notorious bete noir. It is an ode to the international sex trade, a book chock full of explicit sex that leaves the reader cold. The narrator, a civil servant named (coincidentally? I think not) Michel, is detached, observing from the fringes and living a hollow existence. He travels to exotic locations to sleep with whores. He meets Valerie on one such trip. He contacts her when he returns to Paris, they fall in love and cook up a plan to promote sex tourist resorts in Thailand. With fundamentalist Islamism on the rise in this neck of the woods this plan turns out to be ill-advised.

Passages like this one:
"Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child, or a pregnant Palestinian woman had been gunned down in the Gaza Strip, I felt a quiver of enthusiasm at the thought that it meant one less Muslim." provoked charges against Houellebecq of inciting racism. He used free speech as his defense and was acquitted. My view is that he is likely anti-Islam and anti-all religion, not that I neecessarily consider this to be a bad thing.

The narrator claims to love women but all the women in this book are so flawless that they could exist only in some teenager's fantasy. The whores and his ultimate soulmate, Valerie, are beautiful, indulgent and sexual. Valerie is intelligent, successful and makes a shitload of money. We don't see warts or scars or violent pimps or PMS. This book, devoid of any social or emotional content, made me very uncomfortable and I was glad when it all ended badly.