It’s a small white, oval, scored tablet.
* * *
It doesn’t create or transform; it interprets. It renders fleeting what was definitive; it renders contingent what was ineluctable. It supplies a new interpretation of life – less rich, less artificial, and marked by a certain rigidity. It provides no form of happiness, or even of real relief; its action is of a different kind: by transforming life into a sequence of formalities it allows you to fool yourself. On this basis, it helps people to live, or at least to not die – for a certain period of time.
* * *
But death imposes itself in the end: the molecular armour cracks, the process of decomposition resumes its course. It probably happens more quickly for those who have never belonged to the world, who have never imagined living, or loving, or being loved; those who have always known that life was not within their reach. Those people, and there are many of them, have, as they say, nothing to regret; I am not in that situation.
* * *
I could have made a woman happy. Well, two; I have said which ones. Everything was clear, extremely clear from the beginning, but we didn’t realise. Did we yield to the illusion of individual freedom, of an open life, of infinite possibilities? It’s possible; those ideas were part of the spirit of the age; we didn’t formalise them, we didn’t have the taste to do that; we merely conformed and allowed ourselves to be destroyed by them; and then, for a very long time, to suffer as a result.
* * *
God takes care of us; he thinks of us every minute, and he gives us instructions that are sometimes very precise. Those surges of love that flow into our chests and take our breath away – those illuminations, those ecstasies, inexplicable if we consider our biological nature, our status as simple primates – are extremely clear signs.
And today I understand Christ’s point of view and his repeated horror at the hardening of people’s hearts: all of these things are signs, and they don’t realise it. Must I really, on top of everything, give my life for these wretches? Do I really have to be explicit on that point?
* * *
Apparently so.
ALSO BY MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
FICTION
Whatever
The Elementary Particles
Platform
The Possibility of an Island
The Map and the Territory
Submission
POETRY
Unreconciled: Poems 1991–2013
NONFICTION
H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World (with Bernard-Henri Lévy)
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michel Houellebecq is a French novelist, poet, and literary critic. His novels include the international bestsellers Submission, The Elementary Particles, and The Map and the Territory, which won the 2010 Prix Goncourt. He lives in France. You can sign up for email updates here.
Shaun Whiteside is a Northern Irish translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature. He has translated many novels, including Manituana and Altai, by Wu Ming; The Weekend, by Bernhard Schlink; and Magdalene the Sinner, by Lilian Faschinger, which won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German translation in 1997. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Also by Michel Houellebecq
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2019 by Michel Houellebecq
Translation copyright © 2019 by Shaun Whiteside
All rights reserved
Originally published in French in 2019 by Flammarion, France, as Sérotonine
English translation originally published in 2019 by William Heinemann, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2019
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72168-8
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.