"he’d always had a tendency to confuse happiness with coma."

So I read the book The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq the other day (literally, I read it in a day) and it was fantastic. One of the best books I've read in a quite a while, and really quite affecting. Then I learned that a lot of people really don't like Houellebecq, for instance John Updike (who, completely unrelatedly, just died). They seem to regard him as being particularly misanthropic; but it's funny when I read through that John Updike review the quotes that he pulled out were all great, and I smiled at some of them once again (I've read ...Island too, also good). Perhaps this makes me a misanthrope. In one sense it is a very depressing book. It does not try to hide from the realities of life, that you get old and die without ever really achieving much and barely getting a chance to have any decent human relationships or really have much nice happen to you at all. I suppose this is pretty pessimistic; actually I think he's overstating the case a bit. But it's totally refreshing to have someone make no bones about it, no illusions of some sort of spiritual reward at the end of it all. Several reviews mention a likeness to Camus, which makes sense, and also explains why I like Houellebecq so much--Camus is tops. It's a cleansing book, right. Lay things bare so you can see what's really there, take stock, and start again. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. Everyone should read it.