Then the literary maturity is obvious from the first pages. The style has never been so precise, even clinical, quiet, no frills, just perfectly houellebecquien actually. The obsession with this description is again pushed to an almost comical dot (if there is a portable hard drive, it will have its weight, size, brand, plate number ...) even recopy whole pages of Wikipedia, but hey, since Lautreamont, this process seems to us more as strange.
The magnet writer alternating fiction novel / social novel is in the second category is that this new version, and that's good because that's where he's the best in my opinion, ideological overlay of his science fiction is not really to my taste. This time he is telling, as it often does, the biography of an artist, Jed Martin, his journey through life, his few joys, his many disappointments, and especially his work, whose theme is the conflict between reality and its representation, the book extolling the superiority of the second over the first, thanks to ... Michelin maps.
Other fairly disparate topics are covered in this dense profusion a beautiful vegetation: life and death, certainly, but also architecture, pictorial art, France, accidental celebrity, the decline of capitalism, the evanescence of human endeavor, the relationship with the father, euthanasia, murder, police investigations (and there is one, admittedly minimalist, but interesting) ... The story is also an opportunity to introduce a brilliant idea: to stage Michel Houellebecq himself, whose self-portrait is one of the most enjoyable moments of all his work, between lucidity and sadomasochism, megalomania and assumed conscious, willed and claimed self-destruction. And then, of course, the usual croquages celebrities (Beigbeder in but failed artist loved by his family, Patrick Le Lay Ubu drunken and rude, Jean-Pierre Pernaut visionary!), Which are worth visiting. It is, finally, probably the funniest book. A stoic humor, stripper, completely controlled. Laughter expected during playback.
Maybe "The map and the territory" is it led him to become, like "Words" for Sartre, the favorite book of those who do not like Houellebecq ...
