I ENDED UP READING MORE NON-FICTION than fiction, even though there is nothing more rewarding than a story that is, to quote Kafka, 'an ice that breaks the seas frozen inside our souls.' There was indeed Michel Houellebecq, the most widely read French novelist—and a professional provocateur—at work today. After the irreverent, Gauloises-fuelled decades of the existentialists, the lull in French literature seemed never-ending. Then came along Houellebecq. Serotonin (William Heinemann) is Houellebecq's new novel after the massively misread Submission, in which he imagined a Muslim president for the Fifth Republic. Here too, the political got him the headlines. The yellow vests movement that rocked the Macron regime had its prototype in Serotonin, in which French farmers stage a blockade—a superbly choreographed set piece in the novel—as a protest against EU regulations on milk. As the title, inspired by an antidepressant, suggests, Serotonin is bigger than the novelist's acquired prophetic aura. It's about a lone man suffering from sadness. His journey is one of fiction's rare moments of retreat without redemption. Talking of journeys, Salman Rushdie semaphored the most adventurous of them all. Quichotte (Hamish Hamilton) is Don Quixote played out in today's America, featuring a knight with an Indian ancestry and a Sancho who is literally a poignant figment of imagination. Rushdie is not only playing Cervantes for us; Quichotte is a meta-picaresque. It's the thrill—and tragedy—of being trapped in multiple imaginations. Of journeys, the one taken by the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk in Flights (2018) was truly experimental. I chanced upon Flights while browsing through in Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street, London, last year. The multiple travels of the novel, defying genres and inventing suitable narrative devices, gave the world a brand new East European voice after Kafka, Kundera and Klíma. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Riverhead Books) is a smaller book, but darker and brooding, set in the remoteness where even insects will be given an opportunity to reclaim their dignity, courtesy the unlikeliest of serial killers in fiction. And I want to end my fiction choice with another traveller, Jack Reacher, still the wandering vigilante, still with the only baggage of a toothbrush, but, I wondered, whether he had mellowed down a bit lately. The balletic physical action is less now; no more a Persuader (my favourite.) In Blue Moon (Bantam) by Lee Child, Reacher, the longest-living action hero in popular fiction, plays out his justice script in a nameless American city that hides a Russian cyber secret.

Serotonin

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