La Carte et le Territoire

A roman à clef within Houellebecq’s body of work, La Carte et le Territoire follows Jed Martin, an artist who moves from Michelin maps to a series of portraits of writers and industrialists — including “Michel Houellebecq” himself, whom the novel stages up to his own murder, a metatextual device that became famous. More melancholic than polemical, the book observes the end of a productive world, art as a market, and a deindustrialized France, with an unusually tender treatment of filiation (Jed’s father) and a cold humor running through its scenes. Houellebecq appears here for the first time openly as a character in his own novel, a device that weighed heavily in the book’s reception.

Awarded on 8 November 2010 in the first round by 7 votes to 2 for Virginie Despentes (Apocalypse bébé), the prize was hardly contested among the jurors, who praised a novel that was “powerfully novelistic” and perfectly controlled. That is putting it mildly.

Minor traces of sun exposure to the wrappers.