Word: michels
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Despite advances of learning in our computer age, we read daily horoscopes with credulity, and we persist in our study of the still-beguiling works of ancient Merlins. On the Internet, mysterious quatrains of the 16th century French physician and prognosticator Michel Nostradamus purport to contain foreknowledge of plagues and fires and even of 21st century politics. Visions of apocalypse in the Bible's Book of Revelation are persuasive enough to inspire generations of doomsayers and to drive some believers to suicide...
Bruno and Michel are members of that awkward generation too young to be considered baby-boomers and too old to fit in with the Generation-Xers. They are, rather, the product of the hippie free love that was just beginning to flourish on both sides of Atlantic forty-odd years ago. Born to a loveless woman who leaves both sons with their respective grandparents in order to join a commune in California, Bruno and Michel become, essentially, the direct descendants of their age. Both dracins endure lonely and occasionally brutal childhoods that leave them unlovable and incapable of loving...
...everything from Kant to Huxley in lieu of giving them actual thoughts. It is not rare that one encounters such grand generalities as, "He was surprised at how miserable he felt. Far removed from Christian notions of grace and redemption, unfamiliar with the concepts of freedom and compassion, Michel's worldview had grown pitiless and mechanical." Such a statement flounders in the context of a work of fiction, and unfortunately is not redeemed by any breathtaking originality...
...capable of appalling masochistic sexual rituals. As for his individual characters, there is of course no action for them to take other than to wander off into oblivion. Bruno checks into a mental institution where he spends the rest of his pathetic days numbing his libido with cocktail medications. Michel, after discovering a way to clone perfectly rational non-egotistical human beings that will in a few years time subsume flawed humanity, simply disappears. Such episodes could, under different circumstances, be viewed as truly funny and truly scandalous satire. But posed as the outcomes of or even the solutions...
...Michel Houellebecq...