From Mad in Greece: […] it is of no use, we can do nothing for others, I thought, neither friendship nor compassion nor psychology nor understanding of the situation
are of no use, people make the mechanism of their misery themselves
, they turn on the switch and then the mechanism turns and turns, endlessly, with
some failures, some weaknesses when illness intervenes, but it keeps
turning until the end, until the last second.
This was the conclusion reached by Florent-Claude, the protagonist of Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin, at a stage in his life when he had deliberately scattered everything that kept him in his urban routine: his partner, his well-paid job (agricultural consultant), his acquaintances, his expensive apartment, the symbolic pillars that give him a social status. Now, he found himself in an abandoned restaurant, prone, with a gun aimed at his ex-girlfriend’s son.
