Platform: A Novel - Hardcover

Houellebecq, Michel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375414622 ISBN 13: 9780375414626

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2003

Synopsis

A bureaucrat with a taste for pre-packaged goods, Michel Renault travels to Thailand where he begins to gain a taste for the exotic and sensual, an interest that draws him into an intense love affair with Valerie. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

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)

Book Description:

'Reading Houellebecq is like being caught up in a tropical storm: you are blown away by the ferocity of his imagination' Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375414622
• ISBN 13: 9780375414626
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 259