The Map and the Territory

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The Map and the Territory Pub. Date: 11/13/2012 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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The Map and the Territory Pub. Date: 1/3/2012 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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Map and the Territory Pub. Date: 9/28/2011 Publisher: Heinemann, William Limited

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Overview

The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time now delivers his magnum opus—about art and money, love and friendship and death, fathers and sons.

The Map and the Territory is the story of an artist, Jed Martin, and his family and lovers and friends, the arc of his entire history rendered with sharp humor and powerful compassion. His earliest photographs, of countless industrial objects, were followed by a surprisingly successful series featuring Michelin road maps, which also happened to bring him the love of his life, Olga, a beautiful Russian working—for a time—in Paris. But global fame and fortune arrive when he turns to painting and produces a host of portraits that capture a wide range of professions, from the commonplace (the owner of a local bar) to the autobiographical (his father, an accomplished architect) and from the celebrated (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology) to the literary (a writer named Houellebecq, with whom he develops an unusually close relationship).

Then, while his aging father (his only living relative) flirts with oblivion, a police inspector seeks Martin’s help in solving an unspeakably gruesome crime—events that prove profoundly unsettling. Even so, now growing old himself, Jed Martin somehow discovers serenity and manages to add another startling chapter to his artistic legacy, a deeply moving conclusion to this saga of hopes and losses and dreams.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In his partly satirical new novel (after The Possibility of an Island), Houellebecq takes on the contemporary art world and the role of the artist. The book follows the sensational career of Jed Martin, an emotionally stunted Parisian art photographer turned painter, as he navigates the slick machinery of the art market and fraught relationships with his workaholic father and a bombshell Russian. Art historians' assessments of Martin's work, dealing with industry and professions, are humorously invoked throughout; his work is characterized as "the product of a cold, detached reflection on the state of the world"—a description that might be applied to Houellebecq's own oeuvre. Indeed, Houellebecq appears as a central character after he is hired to write a catalog essay for Martin's exhibition and the two become unlikely friends. The author's self-parody is deadpan funny, playing on his real literary world persona of a misanthropic recluse. But Houellebecq's presence grows tiresome, and with a surprising (if clumsy) plot twist, the book morphs into a grotesque police procedural. Houellebecq is most satisfying when he shines a hostile light on a late-capitalist Western culture sated by consumerism and shorn of meaning. For this reason, his take on the art world rings true, though the meditations on mortality and death are among the more compelling sections, in particular those dealing with Martin's father. Houellebecq mostly avoids the hedonistic shock that has earned him the enfant terrible reputation parodied herein, and despite the novel's self-conscious plot contrivances, it is a brilliantly astute work of social critique. (Jan.)

Library Journal

Winner of the Prix Goncourt, this deeply amusing novel by Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles) advances the boundaries of fiction. Just as a map shows much more than a simple photo of a place, so this novel shows how fiction can become more real than mere reality. Houellebecq employs the struggle of young French artist Jed Martin to explore the art of life and the life of art, taking him from photography to mapmaking to the painting of telling portraits. Houellebecq himself enters the novel, plays a part, and moves on, ingeniously transforming the plot in a way that evokes Quentin Tarantino's early film From Dusk Till Dawn. The story eventually becomes a direct investigation of the significance of the roles humans inhabit and how change affects them. The incorporation of the ideas of William Morris and the Buddhist practice of sitting with a corpse enliven the protean narrative. VERDICT A book of supreme importance, this is not to be missed. The occasional French phrase, such as à l'ancienne (old-style), may be lost on some American readers, but the ideas are universal.—Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

A revelation for all who follow the controversial French novelist, whether they love or loathe him. Houellebecq is "a loner with strong misanthropic tendencies," "a tired old decadent" and a "tortured wreck, "who "stank a little, but less than a corpse." At least these are descriptions of a character called "Michel Houellebecq" in the latest novel by the author who shares that name (Platform, 2003, etc.), though the narrative might well inspire readers to temper that caricature of the "real" Houellebecq. Where the novelist has been accused of trafficking in themes such as sex tourism and moral nihilism for shock value, here he achieves a richness and resonance beyond previous work, while continuing to explore free-market economics and how they pertain to artistic value and moral value. The character who shares his name even "seemed happy," shockingly enough, though he keeps his emotional distance from the author, much as he has from readers. Instead, the novel gets deeper beneath the skin of its protagonist, the visual artist Jed Martin, whose career it chronicles from his years as a photographer, whose enlargement of Michelin maps, combined with images from the places mapped, inspire an exhibition titled "THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY." Martin then switches to painting, woodshedding for a decade, emerging with the "Series of Simple Professions," hailed for masterworks such as "Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology" (having destroyed another titled "Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market." Somehow, the novel's fictional biography encompasses a tender romance, a meditation on the function and value of art and a police procedural. Both loners, the painter and the novelist, whom Martin commissions to write catalogue copy and whose portrait he paints, feel some affinity for each other, as they suspect that they might be kindred spirits, or even become friends. What they most share, it seems, is "something that did not exist in H Houellebecq, nor in him: a sort of familiarity with life." Very smart, very moving and occasionally very funny.

Judith Shulevitz

A friend of mine calls this novel Houellebecq's Annie Hall, a description that strikes me as apt for two reasons. First, because, like Woody Allen in that movie, Houellebecq portrays himself here less as a clown than as the established artist he has become, however ambivalently, and grapples with his place in the culture. Second, because this novel is extremely funny, in the dark, disconcerting mode of which both Allen and Houellebecq are masters.
—The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307701558
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 1/3/2012
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 75,282
Product dimensions: 6.58 (w) x 9.76 (h) x 1.11 (d)

Meet the Author

Already honored with the Prix Novembre and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Michel Houellebecq won the Prix Goncourt for The Map and the Territory in 2010.

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