La Carte et le territoire

The novel follows the life and career of Jed Martin, a French artist born in 1975 whose existence is almost wholly bound up with his work. His father was an architect, his grandfather a photographer, and his mother died when he was seven. A series of photographs of hardware gets him into art school in Paris.

Later he travels to Ireland to ask the writer Michel Houellebecq for a text for an exhibition catalogue, and paints his portrait. This gives the author the chance to draw a partly fictional and not always flattering version of himself. It is Houellebecq’s fifth novel.