Fed up with Paris, in he bought a house in County Cork, from which periodically he has sent out despairing messages on his personal blog, accompanied by semi-nude photos taken of himself looking puffy and haggard. The combination of insolence and self-deprecation is in the end irresistible. There is the profusion of protagonists named Michel, the similarity of narratorial tone from book to book β sometimes from character to character. There is the declaration at the beginning of his first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte Maurice Nadeau, , that what follows is a succession of autobiographical anecdotes.
May I lick your pussy? So perhaps it is not surprising that French novelists writing under β or in opposition to β his influence have often included Houellebecq himself as a character in their books. In any case, the latest in a long string of French writers to succumb to this trend is β¦ Michel Houellebecq. His new novel, La carte et le territoire Flammarion , which won the coveted Goncourt Prize in November and was released in the UK as The Map and the Territory Heinemann in September , follows a successful Parisian artist and photographer, Jed Martin, who has chronic problems with his boiler and his ageing father.
We are introduced to him as he is about to fly to Ireland to meet celebrated novelist, Michel Houellebecq, who he has asked to write a text for the catalogue of his forthcoming exhibition. Houellebecq achieves the distance required to produce a self-portrait which is a lot funnier and rings a lot truer than the Houellebecq caricatures in other French novels. And you only have to look at the photo on the dust jacket to know just what he means.
Jobs, though sitting cross-legged on the white leather sofa, appeared paradoxically as an incarnation of the austerity, the Sorge traditionally associated with protestant capitalism.
There was nothing Californian in the way his right hand was hugging his jaw, as though to aid him in a difficult reflection, or in the way he was looking at his interlocutor, full of uncertainty.
