The current nihilist literature, that is, all that can be considered heir to Bukowski's dirty realism or the beat generation, finds in the creativity of a Michel Houellebecq (capable of deploying its subversive narrative in diversity of genres) a new channel for the cause of romantic uprooting passed through the sieve of disenchantment and excesses.
For this to be the case, the disenchanted by everything becomes extreme vitalism, a vitalism that reaches its nemesis in the absolute lucidity of the unrealization of dreams.
In his already extensive bibliography of self-help for the self-destruction of the soul, Houellebecq introduces us in Serotonia to his friend Florent-Claude Labrouste, a patient of himself in that strange psychiatric environment in which chemistry and the nature of discouragement feed off each other without overtones of positive resolution.
But there is beauty in decadence, no doubt, because there are great truths in the blinding lucidity of defeat. With his necessary doses of Captorix to face his shipwreck, Labrouste survives the impossible balance between desires, always strong to the point of laceration, and the heavy certainty that love is just an unattainable chemistry blow for a Labrouste who finds neither courage nor libido nor anything that can make up for the deficiencies of the disenchantment that intoxicates him to the physical.
The best thing about the extreme vitalism that Houellebecq paints in this story is that it offers an unexpected, black and caustic humor that flies over tragedy like the unexpected laughter at the wake, like the discovery of the great final trick and the great lie that living can be. when someone like poor Labrouste thinks he's the first to have discovered the final effect.
Amid memories of his inability to love, Labrouste attracts other losers like himself, enraptured in misery, from whose confluence bright and sinister perceptions of the world emerge.
Because the most tragic of all is that Labrouste, or Houellebecq or whoever it is that stops those ideas about a world never so abandoned of any God as in this XXI century, offers an idea of the general masquerade. The truth of existence hidden behind a trompe l'oeil of imposed happiness.
After a reading like this, it only remains to trust our own production of serotonin or its artificial intake, to continue finding the good side of the tragedy, even laughing at how little we are, we are taught with a book like this as crude as it is necessary.
You can now buy the novel Serotonin, the new book by Michel Houellebecq, here: