"Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time.
A painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life."

This is my first Houellebecq and it won’t be the last, even if I wasn’t quite impressed by this book. I read it in Romanian (“Extinderea Domeniului Luptei”), as the title was translated properly (from the French title “Extension du domain de la lute”). “Whatever” is included in the 1001 Must Read Books list, along with “Elementary Particles” and “Platform”.

More about the book in The Guardian.

“A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterizes the modern era.”