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THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY

Name: THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY
Author: Michel Houellebecq
ISBN: 978-0-307-70155-8

by Michel Houellebecq translated by Gavin Bowd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2012

Very smart, very moving and occasionally very funny.

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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.

Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-307-70155-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
INTERVENTIONS 2020
by Michel Houellebecq ; translated by Andrew Brown

- BOOK REVIEW
SUBMISSION
by Michel Houellebecq ; translated by Lorin Stein

- BOOK REVIEW
PUBLIC ENEMIES
by Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.