Jeb Martin is a Parisian artist whose success does not seem to bring happiness or bliss. His dull relationship with his father and his love affair with a Russian woman, who works for the famous Michelin guides, seem to lack passion and intensity. His life is a map, it is abstract and as if lived from the outside with a cold precision, without any relief and flat. It is the search for the territory, for a life made of passion and enthusiasm –difficult but authentic– that seems to be the underpinning of his failed existence, despite an undoubted social success.

In this book, published in 2010 and winner of the Prix Goncourt the same year, Michel Houellebecq (born in 1956) plays with different literary genres –from detective story to science fiction. He depicts with a cruel but subtle irony a society obsessed with social success where value is just a price and where any longing for happiness seems superficial, forgotten or merely impossible. Houellebecq has a message for us which is like a negative film; it is a provocation for the reader: forget the maps, let's enter the real territory of emotions and life!

We read this book in the summer of 2021.