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"Before you know it as the years go by, you're just like other people you have seen, with all those peculiar human ailments. Just another vehicle for temper and vanity and rashness and all the rest. Who wants it? Who needs it? These things occupy the place where a man's soul should be." -- Henderson the Rain King

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Platform

Book #12 was Michel Houellebecq's Platform. Platform is a French novel which looks at the question of whether a travel company could exploit the market for 'sex tourism'. Building on the age old adage that 'sex sells', the company decides to take it to the extreme, creating Aphrodite clubs where anything goes. Mix that in with a love story, a travel-logue about Thailand, a pretty good sense of humor and Islamic terrorists who don't take to kindly to that whole selling sex thing and you've pretty much got all of the elements for this book.

According to Publisher's Weekly:

"[Houellebecq's] general thesis is that a liberal, hypocritical elite is presiding over the spiritual bankruptcy of the West and retreating from the one Enlightenment idea that is still valid: hedonism. Only the sensations of the body have any worth-hence, the utopian value of sex tourism. "

Um...yeah what they said. All in all I'd rate this one a 'meh' on the 'yuck' to 'awesome' scale.

posted by Jamie at 1:07 AM