The Map and the Territory [Hardcover]

`[Houellebecq] has shown that the novel can still shock and disturb, still be the subject of passionate debate. We're not talking about a reality television show or a film or a video game or a rap artist -- these are cleverly constructed literary novels. All novelists everywhere have benefited from his audacity. Like Flaubert with Madame Bovary, Lawrence with Lady Chatterley's Lover or William Burroughs with Naked Lunch, his temerity has recharged the form and reminded people what the novel can do and what latent, incendiary power it has at its disposal ... As ever with Houellebecq there are fascinating, often very funny observations of the banality of contemporary life...[A] droll and intriguing novel (excellently translated by Gavin Bowd)... Ballard's unique, dystopian vision of the 20th century has found its francophone alter ego in Houellebecq's bleak depictions of the 21st. Houellebecq is French literature's JG Ballard. There can be no higher praise.' --William Boyd, Sunday Times

`The outlaw of French letters returns with an acerbic riff on art and celebrity ... A very interesting writer -- witty, wildly erudite, with a scattergun approach to the inanities that he sees all around him ... In his new novel, THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY, Houellebecq has a field day with everything from the art world to the celebrity culture that permeates modern France to new-monied Russians ... An extended, very entertaining riff on the manipulation of personal image in contemporary society ... Throughout one is regaled with Houellebecq's acerbic observations ... Houellebecq's obsession with the vacuity of our times is evidenced everywhere. As with all of his novels, plot is secondary to acidic social observation and musings about the state of modern France. As he notes toward the end of this thoroughly curious but strangely engaging novel: we all grapple with "the perishable and transitory nature of any human industry". As such, desolation is our natural habitat -- and one against which we all fruitlessly struggle. It's a pure feel-bad Houellebecq conclusion. Then again, he is that fascinating construct: an entertaining pessimist -- and, as such, one who should be read.' --Douglas Kennedy, The Times

`If the French had a prize for literary provocation, Michel Houellebecq would win in a walk ... THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY is a delight to read - a felony in contemporary French fiction, where navel-gazing and high seriousness are valued over mere accessibility ... THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY is vigorously, enjoyably un-French ... Admirably, THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY also skewers the art world's pretentious jargon and galloping mercantilism ... The late novelist John Updike once summed up the conventional view of Houellebecq by deploring the French writer's "thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity". THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY may force a revision of that judgment. It reveals Houellebecq's worst quality to be not contempt for humanity but simply a taste for attracting attention, a trick every neglected boy learns early on. Then he grows up.' --Financial Times

`Houellebecq may have "relapsed into charcuterie", but he's still a great read ... Houellebecq, as both his writing and his infrequent forays into public life suggest, doesn't seem like someone who takes much notice of what people tell him to do. Thank goodness. His fifth novel is a wonderfully strange and subversive enterprise, in which a semi-satirical examination of the art world gives way to a gory police procedural, realistic fictional characters mingle with utterly improbable figures who are in fact taken from real life, the author himself makes a low-key entrance and a thoroughly dramatic exit, and subjects under discussion range from the changing nature of the French countryside to the possibility of accurate artistic representations of art and the probability of writing a compelling thriller about radiators...[Reading Houellebecq] one has the sensation of trying to follow a complex but intriguing game while in possession of about half of the rules ... Novelists who place themselves in their work rarely come out of the endeavour unscathed; the tricksiness of the device is usually either immediately deadening or insufficiently imagined. But in THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY, Houellebecq is a terrific fictional character ... his existence has the reader dancing around the blurry lines between facts and fiction. And he is also fantastically comic: drunken, irreverent, depressed and inconstant ... THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY is a meditation on the relationship between art and the world it seeks to depict, but it is much more besides ... it anatomises France's preoccupation with its past and its traditions...It is also a more reflective, less ragged novel than some of its predecessors, including the extraordinary, exhaustingly furious ATOMISED ... There is also a quietness of tone ... You wouldn't bet your life against that being a neat little trap, though. Houellebecq may be described as "a tired old decadent" in these pages, but I doubt he's quite through with us yet.' --Alex Clark, Guardian

`A dark master of invention ... From the very first paragraph of this brilliant, often preposterous, Prix Goncourt winning novel, the reader can be in no doubt that they're in the blistering bleak, darkly inventive grand massif that is Houellebecq land ... There are no spare parts in this wry novel of ideas, where each element functions not so much as an emotional key but as a kind of Yorick's skull for the contemplation of ideas about artistic, physical and economic decline ... Dystopian this world view may be, but bright, precise shards of ironic wit make it a scintillating read ... The obsession with surface, with commodification, with signs that lead nowhere, with the impossibility of connection, bring to mind that great master of anomalies, JG Ballard, but Houellebecq is more ruthless ... Though it would pain him to read this, in a world of copycatting and fakery, Michel Houellebecq is an exceptional writer and a stand-out original.' --Evening Standard

`A daring provocateur who has finally come in from the cold ... The Prix Goncourt committee took a record hour and a half to elect THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY the winner of France's highest literary honour ... Readers of THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY are unlikely to quibble with the decision. Houellebecq's fifth book is not only his best for years but very likely his best ever, a serious novel about ageing and death that also employs its author's trademark lugubrious wit towards some delicious exercises in satire and self-parody ... A challenging, mature and highly intelligent book, one that happens also to be an excellent jumping-off point for the rest of his output.' --Daily Telegraph

`Houellebecq is an astonishing writer ... THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY is funny, shocking, brutal and unbearably poignant. It is, in the sense that the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke meant it, sublime ... Rarely has a writer depicted themselves in such a hilarious and unflattering manner ... The triangulation of a portrait of Houellebecq by Jed and a portrait of Houellebecq by Houellebecq, all in a book by Houellebecq, is slippery-brilliant ... There is a moment of supreme beauty where the character Houellebecq excoriates consumer culture from the standpoint of a lover of it, and a detached observer watching it - no other writer I know of can merge capitalism, extinction and love in such a manner ... THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY brings together the toxic melancholy of Whatever with the apocalyptic brilliance of ATOMISED. The translation, by St Andrews academic Gavin Bowd, manages to be flowingly unobtrusive when necessary and jolting into different registers when necessary. Houellebecq has discovered a way to make novels about work and sex and art new again: would that more wannabe writers took the trouble to investigate the opportunities and challenges he has created.' --Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

This novel is probably the least inflammatory, most playful and accessible of Houellebecq's fiction to date. He has fun satirising the art world, French tourism, various real-life French cultural figures and, of course, himself, for whom he reserves an appealingly sticky end.' --Daily Mail

`There is plenty to enjoy in this comically bleak take on urban alienation ... Funny, sad but sharp, too, about the way modern capitalism makes labour precarious.' --Metro (4-Star review)

Part thriller, part satire, Houellebecq's prize winning and critically acclaimed new novel will be a publishing sensation