I'm a Bookworm

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La Possibilité d’une île was written by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq and was first published in France in 2005. It plays on a lot of the themes that make Houellebecq a writer who speaks with a voice that the modern generation can hear and understand: modern alienation & loneliness, scientific advances, comedy, and lots and lots of sex.

The scene flips back and forth between 3 different scenarios. The first is a man living in our own time called Daniel. He is a comedian and really bored and alienated from his life. He can’t enjoy himself which is ironic considering his life’s work is to entertain other people.  He tries sex, love and cults, all with underwhelming results.

The other two scenarios are versions of Daniel in the future, who have been preserved through a breakthrough in technology that allows humans to live forever.  Carbon copies of individuals are made which replace the current bodies when they die. In other words, there are only a finite amount of humans, and they are constantly replicated. However, the eternal cloning process makes each successive copy less and less like the copy before. For example, the new humans lose their feelings, their memories, and they lose contact with another, becoming more and more isolated, almost like a diluted cup of tea that eventually runs clear and is only water.

I don’t think I would recommend this book, although Michel Houellebecq is one of my favorite authors of all time, and one of the few real, authentic voices of postmodern Western society. The reason: the book is extremely successful in portraying the two future worlds — bleak, emotionless, isolated and silent. His efforts were so successful that I got bored and wanted to do something other than read the book.

I would absolutely recommend two of his other novels, however, which are called Platform and Atomised.

- The Reader