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By the most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time, this Goncourt-winning masterpiece - about art and money, love and friendship and death, fathers and sons - will bring Michel Houellebecq the broad readership in America that he has long enjoyed internationally.
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 lifetime told with sharp humor and powerful compassion. His first photographs feature Michelin road maps (hence the title), and global success arrives with his series on professions: portraits of various personalities, including a writer named Houellebecq, captured at their work. Not long afterward, Jed helps a police inspector solve a heinous crime that leaves lasting marks on everyone involved. But after burying his father and growing old himself, Jed will also discover serenity and add another chapter to his artistic legacy, a deeply moving conclusion to this saga of hopes and losses and dreams.
"A brilliant risk taker unafraid of being distasteful (hey, the French invented the term é pater le bourgeoisie), Houellebecq has attracted critical acclaim, controversy, and an intent if not immense audience when published here." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. Very smart, very moving and occasionally very funny." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Beautifully, accurately translated... Accessible and highly enjoyable. If ever there was a novelist for our globally dysfunctional times it's Michel Houellebecq... Long cast aside as the bad boy of books, [his] latest novel has seen him brought in from the cold, and embraced by the literary establishment for what he's always been – not much short of a genius." - The Mirror
"By and large, The Map and the Territory sees Houellebecq as bitterly nostalgic for a vanished France, and simultaneously eager to embrace the technological innovations that have come in the wake of its decline. It's compulsive reading, and its ideas alone electrify the mind... But it isn't Houellebecq's best novel, and the thought that the prize was in fact awarded for his extraordinary fiction in general is difficult to resist." - Taipei Times
"[A] delight to read... It reveals Houellebecq's worst quality to be not contempt for humanity but simply a taste for attracting attention..." - Financial Times (UK)
"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... But there is also a quietness of tone that makes his writing if not exactly pleasant then marginally more hospitable." - The Guardian (UK)
"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 (UK)
"[A] serious novel about aging and death that also employs its author's trademark lugubrious wit towards some delicious exercises in satire and self-parody..." - Daily Telegraph (UK)
"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... 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..." - Evening Standard (UK)
This information about The Map and the Territory was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Michael Lionstar
Michel Houellebecq is a French novelist, poet, and literary critic. His novels include the international bestseller The Elementary Particles and The Map and the Territory, which won the 2010 Prix Goncourt. He lives in France.
Link to Michel Houellebecq's Website
Name Pronunciation
Michel Houellebecq: me-shell oo-ell-beck ("oo-ell" will sound like "well" to many English speakers)
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