Well, I’ve finished Atomised. It is certainly a disturbing and thought provoking book, with added touches of melancholy and black humour thrown in for good measure. As you get in to the book, you begin to wonder if the fairly detailed accounts of gratuitous sexual activity are merely self indulgence on the part of the author. Perhaps they are, and yet they do have relevance to the ultimate goal of the story, which is not actually revealed until the final pages, and is disturbing in itself. If you read this book, prepare to have some of your ideas challenged, and others reinforced. But beware, as the book occasionally trips over into pretentiousness, although more often than not, that is a deliberate ploy on the part of the author to further ridicule and parody the progenitors of the ideas that are the target of his polemic.
“Light reading” is not a description that could apply to this book. Equally “compulsory”, an adjective applied in the Time Out review, is possibly going over the top. But from me it gets “recommended”.
separating the wanted from the unwanted