Whatever · 1994
Houellebecq's debut. A joyless thirty-year-old programmer is sent to train staff in the provinces, paired with a colleague who has no luck at all with women. It is a cold, funny look at how market logic spreads into love and sex, sorting people into winners and losers.
The Elementary Particles · 1998
The story of two half-brothers - one a withdrawn, emotionally frozen biologist, the other consumed by desire and loneliness. Through their lives Houellebecq draws a portrait of a generation for whom the sexual revolution brought not happiness but emptiness.
