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Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life and a terrible attitude, the anti-hero of this grim, funny novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague – the sexually-frustrated Raphael Tisserand – to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system

Houellebecq's first novel was a smash hit in France, expressing the misanthropic voice of a generation. Like A Confederacy of Dunces, Houellebecq's bitter, sarcastic and exasperated narrator vociferously expresses his frustration and disgust with the world.

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143 printed pages

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Quotes

Sofihas quoted10 years ago
Of course experience has quickly taught me that I’m only called on to meet people who, if not exactly alike, are at least quite similar in their manners, their opinions, their tastes, their general way of approaching life. Theoretically, then, there is nothing to fear inasmuch as the professional nature of the meeting guarantees, in principle, its innocuousness.
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Sofihas quoted10 years ago
His mediocrity is distressing. He can’t stop talking about money and investment: share packages, portfolios, high interest saving schemes … the full set. He’s banking on a level of wage increase slightly higher than inflation. He bores me somewhat. I don’t really manage to reply to him.
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Sofihas quoted10 years ago
The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. And little by little death’s countenance appears in all its glory. The third millennium augurs well.
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