Platform by Michel Houellebecq

early as the preface to denounce sex tourism, that "repulsive slavery." All in all, these backpacking routards were bellyaching bastards whose goal was to spoil every little pleasure on offer to tourists, whom they despised. In fact, they seemed to like themselves more than anything else, if one were to go by the sarcastic little phrases scattered throughout the book, along the lines of "Ah, my friends, if you had been there back in the hippie days!" The most excruciating thing was probably their stern, dogmatic, peremptory tone, quivering with repressed indignation: "We're far from prudish, but Pattaya we don't like. Enough is enough." A bit further on, they laid into "potbellied Westerners" who strolled around with little Thai girls; it made them "literally puke." Humanitarian Protestant cunts, that's what they were, they and the "cool bunch of mates who helped to make this book possible," their nasty little faces smugly plastered all over the back cover. I flung the book hard across the room, missing the Sony television by a whisker, and wearily picked up The Firm , by John Grisham. It was an American best-seller, one of the "best," meaning one of those that had sold the most copies. The hero was a young lawyer with a bright future, a talented, goodlooking boy who worked eighty hours a week. Not only was this shit so obviously a proto-screenplay it was obscene, but you had the feeling the author had already given some thought to the casting, since the part had obviously been written for Tom Cruise. The hero's wife wasn't bad either, even if she didn't work eighty hours a week, but in this case, Nicole Kidman wouldn't fit, it wasn't a part for someone with curly hair —more like someone with a blow-dry. Thank God the lovebirds didn't have any children, which meant we were spared a number of grueling scenes. It was a suspense thriller—well, there was a little suspense: as early as chapter 2, it was obvious that the guys running the firm were bastards, and there was no way the hero, or his wife for that matter, Was going to die at the end. But, in the meantime, to prove he wasn't joking, the author was going to sacrifice a couple of sympathetic minor characters. Finding out which ones might make it worth a read. Maybe it would be the hero's father. His business was going through a bad patch, he was having trouble adjusting to the new matrix management; I had a feeling that this would be his last Thanksgiving *

6
    Valérie had spent the early years of her life in Tréméven, a hamlet a few kilometers north of Guingamp. In the seventies and early eighties, the government and local councils had nurtured an ambition to create a massive production center for pork products in Brittany, one capable of rivaling those of Britain or Denmark. Encouraged to adopt intensive farming methods, the young farmers —including Valerie's fatherbecame heavily indebted to the Crédit Agricole. In 1984, pork prices began to collapse. Valérie was eleven years old. She was a well-behaved girl, a bit lonely, a good student, and she was about to enter her second year at the high school in Guingamp. Her older brother, also a good student, had just passed his bac; he had enrolled in preparatory classes in agronomy at the lycée in Rennes.
    Valérie remembered Christmas 1984, a day her father had spent entirely with the accountant from the National Farmers' Union. He was silent for much of Christmas dinner. During dessert, after two glasses of champagne, he spoke to his son. "I can hardly recommend that you take over the farm," he said. "For twenty years now I've been getting up at dawn and finishing the day at eight or nine o'clock. Your mother and I, we've barely had a holiday. I'd be as well off selling the place now, with all the machinery and the farm buildings, and investing the money in tourist property —I could spend the rest of my days working on my tan."
    In the years that followed, pork prices continued to plummet. There were farmers'