La Carte et le Territoire
Inscribed: “Pour Tina, il n'est pas impossible que vous aimiez ce livre. Michel Houellebecq.”
The central character of Michel Houellebecq’s La Carte et le Territoire might well be the water heater — the one that breaks down on 15 December. Neither individual lives nor contemporary art are the book’s real subject; rather, it is the end of the industrial age in Europe, the triumph and completion of capitalism. Houellebecq shows how a poor alignment of technical and human progress turns what we take to be advances into the grave of our humanity.
A “world as supermarket and derision,” in which Houellebecq, paraphrasing Schopenhauer, writes that he has “more or less finished with the world as narrative — the world of novels and films, and of music too. I am now only interested in the world as juxtaposition — that of poetry, of painting” (La Carte et le Territoire, p. 259).
Arguably one of the author’s most accomplished and fully realized novels.
The deluxe-paper printing was only produced in August.