Contents:
Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read.
Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Chloe is your typical college student: But the last thing she ever expected was to be abducted.
Especially not by beings from another world. Traveling across the galaxy isn't a short trip, and Chloe's captors need to keep her healthy. That means nourishment, whether she wants it or not. And, of c Chloe is your typical college student: And, of course, the human body has other needs as well. Including some from the bedroom. Which may be exactly what they have in mind. Chloe soon finds herself a very long way from home. And to make matters worse, she's not exactly alone. Kindle Edition , 40 pages.
To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Abduction Tentacles, Sensory Deprivation, Aliens , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. May 08, Tanager Leigh rated it did not like it Shelves: This is my inaugural month with Kindle Unlimited, so it's free The writing is fine; there are no noticeable spelling errors. The scifi-sex fantasy has potential to be interesting.
Chloe is a college student who takes a late night walk to the coffeeshop but never makes it as she is sucked up into a passing spaceship by a beam of light. She awakens to find she is well-restrained and weightless. There is a somewhat erotic scenario in which she is teased etc. I didn't read the excerpt.
After that there were a bunch of ads for other "books". And this is the portion of my review that will provide excerpts of my reviews for those ads: Not going to buy that. If you really want to reads a good tentacles - sensory deprivation - aliens sex story, I can find you a great one for free online somewhere. Nations rated it did not like it Feb 13, Beth Underwood scott rated it liked it Feb 06, Margaret Brunswick rated it it was ok Dec 06, Sasha rated it did not like it May 19, Jasmine rated it did not like it Dec 16, Michael rated it it was ok Oct 04, Brittany Frazier rated it it was ok Jun 13, A few years ago, he was an obscure poet and recovering mental patient with a single novel under his belt and a day job debugging computers at the French parliament.
A novel overflowing with anguish and graphic descriptions of anonymous sex, it sold , copies and incited a national verbal slugfest unlike anything France had ever seen.
Debated on the front page of Le Monde and denounced by the Catholic press, the book bitterly divided the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize. The award went to someone else. Meanwhile, French Gen X'ers launched a Houellebecq fan club on the internet to discuss his philosophical kinship with Nietzsche and Celine.
Houellebecq is now, at 42, a wealthy one-man multimedia franchise. Hoping that he will prove just as provocative - and bankable - in English, Knopf has brought out The Elementary Particles in translation this month, according it the kind of print run 40, copies rarely lavished on a foreign novel. It's a quixotic wager. Houellebecq's book is an original work of art - ironic, intelligent and as airtight and elegant as a geometry proof.
It is also considerably bleaker than any French sex-and-death novel in recent memory. The Elementary Particles tells the story of Bruno and Michel, a pair of half-brothers who are palmed off to grandparents at a tender age by irresponsible hippie parents. Bruno grows up to become a self-loathing, sex-obsessed psychiatric patient who, though 'prepared to go to the ends of the earth' for nubile flesh 'wrapped in a miniskirt', is rarely satisfied.
He abandons the one woman who loves him, when she becomes a wheelchair-bound invalid.
As for Michel, he becomes a chronically depressed molecular biologist who commits suicide off the Irish coast - but not without leaving a blueprint for establishing a new species of perfectly rational human clones, the only hope for saving mankind from self-destruction. The wretched characters, affectless prose and clinical descriptions of group sex 'Bruno and Rudi took turns penetrating Hannelore' are deeply disturbing.
But the French took exception to something else: The Elementary Particles takes pains to ensure that we don't see Bruno and Michel merely as products of bad parenting or dumb luck. Rather, they are victims of a culture awash in posts values. Over the course of the novel's pages, Houellebecq catalogues a daunting number of alleged scourges - the free market, New Age mysticism, legal abortion, skyrocketing divorce rates, materialism, debauchery - and lays them at the door of counterculture idealism.
According to the novel's freewheeling historical logic, the s begat not peace and prosperity but selfishness, misery and violence. It's a simple metaphor. His biggest gripe, however, is about what has happened to sex. The Parisian swingers' club that Bruno frequents is the apotheosis of sexual liberation gone awry. Erotic possibilities abound, but sex in the club is ultimately another free-market competition, a contest stacked in favour of the strongest and most beautiful. Bruno doesn't make the cut. He ends up checking into a mental hospital, where he plans to spend the rest of his days on a regimen of drugs that kill his libido.
The problem is that people take no more pleasure in sex. For example, more and more white women don't want to go out with white men. They aren't virile enough.
And white men, they want to go out with black or Arab women. It's not a question of race, but that sex is still forbidden to these women. It is reckless armchair sociologising like this that gets him into trouble, a fact he cavalierly dismisses. In France, Houellebecq is infamous for giving Michel, his biologist anti-hero, the same last name - Djerzinski - as a high-ranking Stalinist official and then defending the gesture by saying Stalin wasn't such a bad guy.
After all, Houellebecq told a French magazine that Stalin 'killed a lot of anarchists'. His antipathy for democracy 'Liberty is equivalent to suffering,' he said on French TV has caused much hand-wringing among the intelligentsia. His confidence, however, remains unshakable. Or, as Marie-Pierre put it: It's the world that's depressing. Initially, Houellebecq set out to change the world. His first novel, L'Extension du Domaine de la Lutte Extension of the Battlefield , which appeared in , features a physically repellent software technician whose unrealistic obsession is to find a woman who will have sex with him.
Instead of losing his virginity, he ends up losing his life in a car crash. Houellebecq believed the book would force people to reconsider the premium we place on physical beauty. When you go into a club today, you see the same behaviour as six years ago. A novel won't ever change the world. With The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq abandoned his fantasy of fixing the world and tried to imagine a more perfect one instead.
The society of human clones at the end of the book approximates Houellebecq's idea of utopia.
Houellebecq's friends don't wonder at his self-imposed exile abroad. And that explains everything. Mary Seitz added it Dec 22, He says all this, but he does the exact opposite in his life. In a sense, he is the ultimate example of what he hates. It's a simple metaphor.
Freed from the shackles of sexual reproduction, Darwinian competitiveness vanishes. Gone, too, are egotism, violence and greed. As for sex, it exists purely for fun: Houellebecq - who maintains an open marriage, frequents swingers' clubs and estimates that he sleeps with 25 women a year - said that he couldn't imagine anything nicer than 'having clitorises all over your body'.
Is Houellebecq, the sexual libertine, guilty of not practicing what he preaches? He says all this, but he does the exact opposite in his life. In a sense, he is the ultimate example of what he hates. Houellebecq's friends don't wonder at his self-imposed exile abroad. They wonder at his being alive at all. And that explains everything. Like the parents of his ill-starred protagonists, Houellebecq's own were hippies, committed neither to each other nor to child rearing, and at the age of six, Michel was shipped off to a grandmother south-west of Paris.
He has no idea where his parents are today - or even if they are alive. During high school, Houellebecq spent hours by himself watching trains at the station next door. Beigbeder realised just how depressed one evening not long ago, when he popped a Moody Blues ballad into his CD player and saw Houellebecq burst into tears: Finally he explained that at all the parties when he was 18, all the boys and girls slow-danced to this song, but he was alone and no one talked to him because he was ugly.
At 18, Houellebecq was rejected for French military service because of a morphine addiction. In , he graduated from college with a degree in agricultural engineering. He married, had a son and divorced. Within a few years, he was unemployed, drinking heavily and in and out of mental hospitals, where he was treated for anxiety. Around the same time, he began to publish poems.
But it wasn't until he took a job as a software technician in that he found his true subject as a novelist - the everyday routine of a working stiff.