Serotonin: A Novel

To tell the truth, if I had been a stag or a Brazilian macaque, the question wouldn’t even have arisen: the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype. This attitude had been maintained for a long time in the first human populations.

our student years are the only happy ones, when the future seems open, when everything seems possible, and after that adulthood and a career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut. That’s probably also why the friendships of our youth, the ones we make during our time as students and which are our only true friendships, never

Now, however, I was going to stick them on the wall, each one in its place, not in the hope that they would exude any kind of beauty or meaning; but I would still carry on to the end, because I could, I could in material terms; it was a task physically within my range. So I did.

The outside world was harsh, merciless towards the weak, and hardly ever kept its promises, and love remained the only thing in which one could still, perhaps, have faith.

the gentle mooing of the cows, the not entirely disagreeable smell of dung, they all briefly gave me the sense of – I wouldn’t say of having a place in the world, let’s not overstate the case – but of belonging to a kind of organic continuum, of animal regrouping.

I hadn’t been formatted for such a proposition, it wasn’t part of my software; I was a modern man, and for me, like for all of my contemporaries, a woman’s professional career was something that had to be respected above all else – it was the absolute criterion, it meant overtaking barbarism and leaving the Middle Ages.

An atmosphere of general catastrophe always alleviates individual catastrophe – that’s probably why suicides are so rare in wartime

People never listen to the advice you give them, and when they ask for advice it’s specifically with a view to not following it, and have it confirmed by an external voice that they are stuck in a spiral of annihilation and death; the advice one gives them plays exactly the same role for them as that of the tragic choir, confirming to the hero that

Perhaps there were also young people – well, certain young people – who belonged to the aristocracy of beauty simply by virtue of their youth, and who maybe went on believing it for a few years, between two and five but certainly less than ten; it was early June, and as I went to the café every morning I was forced to admit it: it wasn’t the girls’