Whatever - Softcover

The balance between philosophy and narrative detail is perfectly judged; the book slips down easily like a bad oyster. As is the nature of such things, it is grimly comic (Nicholas Lezard Guardian)

The mischief-making enfant terrible of new-wave French fiction (Independent)

Le grand fromage du jour (The Face)

It could well turn out to be a cult here too... Astonishing (Time Out)

Snappy, bite-sized, and often very funny. Is it European exhaustion? Is it the soul of man under late capitalism? Millenial gloom? Post-Christian despair? Is it the Death of Love? Whatever. But Houellebecq describes it perfectly (Literary Review)

Funny, terrifying and nauseating (Independent)

This boy needs serious therapy. He may be beyond help (Washington Post)

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny and clever 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, that is, he's packed off with a colleague - the unimaginably ugly, sexually-frustrated virgin Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system... A painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life.