Atomised

Atomised, known in French as Les Particules élémentaires, is a novel by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, published in August 1998 by Éditions Flammarion. It is his second novel and brought him wide attention in France. In the United Kingdom it appeared as Atomised and in the United States as The Elementary Particles, in the translation by Frank Wynne.

The book follows two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, born in the late 1950s to a hippie-era mother, Janine, who lived fully the ideals of a permissive society. Both grow up under maternal neglect: Michel is raised by his paternal grandmother and becomes an introverted molecular biologist, unable to feel deep emotions; Bruno is passed from one boarding school to another in a brutal environment and ends up in a loveless marriage and a compulsive sexual life that never satisfies him. The events mostly take place in 1999, but the narration is in fact set some fifty years later, making it a framed narrative similar to the device Kurt Vonnegut used in Galápagos. Unlike Vonnegut, Houellebecq reveals the frame only in the epilogue.

The novel's bleak tone raises questions about individualism, desire and emotional emptiness in modern society. Its conclusion shows how Michel's scientific work eliminates sexual reproduction, and suggests that human beings are nothing but particles that decay and can be recomposed.

The book sold very well and made its author a central figure in French intellectual debate. Its explicit sexual descriptions drew criticism, and the Prix Novembre it received was controversial. It was later adapted for the screen by Oskar Roehler in 2006, in a loose version that won the Silver Bear for best actor at Berlin.