Praise for The Map and the Territory
Winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt
"A serious reflection on art, death, and contemporary society, The Map and the Territory is a tour de force."--The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Powerful. . . . [A] singular novel. . . . Archly sarcastic, cheerily pedantic, willfully brutal." --The New York Times Book Review
"An ingenious and engaging composite of künstlerroman and police procedural; a novel of ideas; and an authorial self-reflection." -The Boston Globe
"All novelists everywhere have benefited from [Houellebecq's] audacity. . . . his temerity has recharged the form and reminded people what the novel can do." --The Sunday Times
"Funny, astonishing and authoritative. . . . This is the brilliant and controversial French writer's most intellectually ambitious book.." --The Guardian
"Beautifully, accurately translated . . . . 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
"One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq . . . is that he is a first-rate prose stylist. . . . Teasing and entertaining. . . . A page turner." --Literary Review
"Houellebecq's bewitching journey on the river of art to the cave of death and decay is a tale of eviscerating insight, caustic humor, troubling beauty, and haunting provocation." -Booklist
"[Houellebecq is] a trenchant, sharp-tongued social commentator."--Bookforum
"Very likely his best [book] ever, 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. . . . Challenging, mature and highly intelligent." --The Daily Telegraph
"A dark master of invention. . . . In a world of copycatting and fakery, Michel Houellebecq is an exceptional writer and a stand-out original." --Evening Standard
"An astonishing writer. . . . The Map and the Territory is funny, shocking, brutal and unbearably poignant. . . . Sublime." --Scotland on Sunday
Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
Jeff Koons had just got up from his chair, enthusiastically throwing his arms out in front of him. Sitting opposite him, slightly hunched up, on a white leather sofa partly draped with silks, Damien Hirst seemed to be about to express an objection; his face was flushed, morose. Both of them were wearing black suits—Koons’s had fine pinstripes—and white shirts and black ties. Between them, on the coffee table, was a basket of candied fruits that neither paid any attention to. Hirst was drinking a Bud Light.
Behind them, a bay window opened onto a landscape of tall buildings that formed a Babylonian tangle of gigantic polygons that stretched across the horizon. The night was bright, the air absolutely clear. They could have been in Qatar, or Dubai; the decoration of the room was, in reality, inspired by an advertisement photograph, taken from a German luxury publication, of the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi.
Koons’s forehead was slightly shiny. Jed shaded it with his brush and stepped back three paces. There was certainly a problem with Koons. Hirst was basically easy to capture: you could make him brutal, cynical in an “I shit on you from the top of my pile of cash” kind of way; you could also make him a rebel artist (but rich all the same) pursuing an anguished work on death; finally, there was in his face something ruddy and heavy, typically English, which made him look like a rank-and-file Arsenal supporter. In short, there were various aspects to him, but all of them could be combined into a coherent, representative portrait of a British artist typical of his generation. Koons, on the other hand, seemed to have a duality, an insurmountable contradiction between the basic cunning of the technical sales rep and the exaltation of the ascetic. It was already three weeks now that Jed had been retouching Koons’s expression as he stood up from his chair, throwing out his arms as if he were trying to convince Hirst of something. It was as difficult as painting a Mormon pornographer.
He had photographs of Koons on his own, in the company of Roman Abramovich, Madonna, Barack Obama, Bono, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates... Not one of them managed to express anything of the personality of Koons, to go beyond the appearance of a Chevrolet convertible salesman that he had decided to display to the world, and this was exasperating. In fact, for a long time photographers had exasperated Jed, especially the great photographers, with their claim to reveal in their snapshots the truth of their models. They didn’t reveal anything at all, just placed themselves in front of you and switched on the motor of their camera to take hundreds of random snapshots while chuckling, and later chose the least bad of the lot; that’s how they proceeded, without exception, all those so-called great photographers. Jed knew some of them personally and had nothing but contempt for them; he considered them all about as creative as a Photomaton.
In the kitchen, a few steps behind him, the boiler uttered a succession of loud banging noises. It went rigid, paralyzed. It was already 15 December.
One year before, on almost the same date, his boiler had uttered the same succession of banging noises before stopping completely. In a few hours, the temperature in the studio had fallen to thirty-seven degrees. He had managed to sleep a little, or rather doze off, for brief periods. Around six in the morning, he had emptied the hot-water tank to wash himself quickly, then had brewed coffee while waiting for the man from Plumbing in General, who had promised to send someone in the early hours of the morning.
On its Web site, Plumbing in General offered to “make plumbing enter the third millennium”; they could at least start by turning up on time, grumbled Jed at about eleven, pacing around his studio in a vain attempt to warm himself up. He was then working on a painting of his father, which he was going to entitle The Architect Jean-Pierre Martin Leaving the Management of His Business; inevitably, the drop in temperature meant that the last layer of paint would take an age to dry. He had agreed, as he did every year, to dine with his father on Christmas Eve, two weeks hence, and hoped to have finished it by then; if a plumber didn’t intervene quickly, his plan risked being compromised. To tell the truth, in absolute terms, it wasn’t that important: he didn’t intend to offer this painting to his father as a gift; he wanted simply to show it to him. Why, then, was he suddenly attaching so much importance to it? He was at the end of his tether; he was working too hard, had started six paintings simultaneously. For a few months he hadn’t stopped. It wasn’t sensible.
At around three in the afternoon, he decided to call Plumbing in General again, but the line was constantly engaged. He managed to get through to them just after five, when the customer-service secretary explained that there had been an exceptional workload due to the frigid weather, but promised that someone would certainly come the following morning. Jed hung up, then reserved a room in the Mercure Hotel on the boulevard Auguste-Blanqui.
He waited all of the following day for the arrival of Plumbing in General, but also for Simply Plumbers, whom he had managed to contact in the meantime. While Simply Plumbers promised to respect the craft traditions of “higher plumbing,” they showed themselves to be no more capable of turning up on time.
In the painting he had made of him, Jed’s father, standing on a podium in the middle of the group of about fifty employees that made up his business, was lifting his glass with a sorrowful smile. The farewell party took place in the open space of his architectural practice, a large room thirty meters by twenty with white walls and a skylight, under which computer design posts alternated with trestle tables carrying the scale models of current projects. Most of those present were nerdy-looking young people—the 3-D designers. Standing at the foot of the podium, three fortysomething architects surrounded his father. In accordance with a configuration borrowed from a minor painting by Lorenzo Lotto, each of them avoided the eyes of the others, while trying to catch those of his father; each of them, you understood right away, nurtured the hope of succeeding him as the head of the business. His father’s eyes, staring just above those present, expressed the desire to gather his team around him for one last time, and a reasonable confidence in the future, but also an absolute sadness. Sadness at leaving the business he had founded, to which he had given all his strength, and sadness at the inevitable: you were quite obviously dealing with a finished man.
In the middle of the afternoon, Jed tried in vain, a dozen times, to get through to Ze Plumb, who used Skyrock Radio as its hold music, while Simply Plumbing had opted for the radio station Laughter and Songs.
At about five, he returned to the Mercure Hotel. Night was falling on the boulevard Auguste-Blanqui; some homeless people had lit a fire on one side of the street.
The subsequent days passed more or less in the same way: dialing numbers of plumbing businesses, being redirected almost instantaneously to on-hold music, waiting, as it got colder and colder, next to his painting, which refused to dry.
A solution came on the morning of 24 December, in the form of a Croatian workman who lived nearby on the avenue Stephen-Pichon; Jed had noticed his sign by accident while returning from the Mercure Hotel. He was available, yes, immediately....
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