Michel Houellebecq · 2010 · exile

Houellebecq's Goncourt winner, in which he writes himself in as a character and then has himself murdered. Jed Martin photographs Michelin maps, becomes internationally famous, paints portraits of people at work, and asks a reclusive novelist living in Ireland to write his catalogue text - which turns out badly for the novelist.

1. 1
   Le Raincy

   Jed Martin's childhood in the eastern suburbs: an architect father, a photographer grandfather, and a mother who killed herself when he was seven - which nobody explains to him, and which he does not ask about for forty years.

2. 2
   Paris

   The thirteenth arrondissement and the Avenue Stephen-Pichon, a flat with a boiler that never works - three hundred photographs of hardware that get him into the Beaux-Arts, and a career made and abandoned three times over.

3. 3
   The A20

   Driving south to bury his grandmother, he stops at a service area before La Souterraine and unfolds a Michelin map of the Creuse and Haute-Vienne - and has, beside the cellophane sandwiches, his second aesthetic revelation.

4. 4
   Chatelus-le-Marcheix

   The grandmother's village in the Creuse, and the funeral - the house he inherits and does nothing with for years, in the empty rural France the novel imagines being sold back to tourists.

5. 5
   Beauvais

   His father the architect in a retirement home, dying of cancer by degrees - and the Christmas dinners the two of them keep having because neither can think how to stop.

6. 6
   Shannon

   Jed flies to Ireland to ask Michel Houellebecq to write his catalogue text - and finds a misanthrope in a house full of unwashed dishes who agrees for a Rolls-Royce, and whose portrait he paints as a gift.

7. 7
   Zurich

   Jean-Pierre Martin goes to a Swiss clinic to end it, and Jed follows to stop him and arrives too late - and afterwards learns from a policeman that the mother's death was suicide too, which he had never been told.

8. 8
   Souppes-sur-Loing

   Houellebecq leaves Ireland for the house he grew up in and sleeps in his old childhood bed - and is found there cut into strips with the portrait gone, which is the crime the last third of the novel investigates.

9. 9
   Chatelus-le-Marcheix

   Jed goes back to the Creuse for thirty years, fences off the land and films vegetation swallowing manufactured objects - and the last images in the book are a world of plants with the people gone out of it.