To start with, the plot of the book is, how to say, nothing to write home about. The story traces the life of an upper-class photographer-turned-painter in France as he goes from being a dull loner -- with no particular interests other than his art, which he doesn’t seem to be too excited about either -- to a superhighly paid dull loner snapping away pictures of decomposing industrial materials in his mansion (OK, nice point perhaps, not sure), until the time comes when he finally decides to present these mind-blowing images to a thankful and wowed world that’s surely been left in a sort of bereavement during the period since the artist’s going into reclusion. The events take place over a span of 20-30 years, from the 00s to the near future, the 2020s. I'm somewhat mystified. I may reread it someday to study what I missed on first reading, which is probably a lot. Seine alte Schärfe mag Michel Houellebecq inzwischen verloren haben, aber nicht seinen sentimentalen Lustekel an der Welt." - Iris Radisch, Die Zeit Primer libro que leo de Houellebecq y la experiencia me resultó ampliamente positiva. Era un autor con el que tenía muchas dudas porque las reseñas de sus libros suelen ser muy dispares, y lo que encontré fue una novela ágil, con una prosa sencilla y de muy fácil lectura, que aunque a primera vista puede parecer una novela muy simple, no lo es, porque Houellebecq va minando sutilmente el libro con temas de lo más variados que invitan a la reflexión y hacen que la novela gane en complejidad aún cuando el argumento y la trama de la historia son de lo más sencillo. The Map and the Territory is the first major Luigi Ghirri retrospective to go on show outside the artist’s native Italy. The focus of the exhibition rests on the 1970s, a key period in the expansion of the suburbs and the service economy, the emergence of conceptual art and the mainstreaming of Pop and its strategies of appropriation. Framed inside this context, Ghirri, who used tools and processes from amateur photography — a small Canon camera, colour film – began to photograph the suburbs of Modena, thus creating an unmatched body of work inside the prevalent art photography of the time.

D'un autre côté je me dis que c'est le propos de Houellebecq de donner une espèce de bilan de la relation des Français ou des Européens de l'ouest au travail aujourd'hui... Mais je trouve ça quand même misérabiliste, un peu.Novela complicadilla esta, para qué os voy a engañar, y que tiene no un transfondo, ni dos ni tres... pero a mí me ha resultado muy fácil de leer por la manera cómo escribe Houellebecq, que me encanta. Neil Gaiman retells the parable in reference to storytelling in Fragile Things (it was originally to appear in American Gods):

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory. Gregory Bateson, in "Form, Substance and Difference", from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), argued the essential impossibility of knowing what any actual territory is. Any understanding of any territory is based on one or more sensory channels reporting adequately but imperfectly: There are practically no children here, and procreation is presented as being on its last legs: not only did Jed's difficult birth render his mother unable to have any more children, Houellebecq eventually even throws in an infertile couple whose dog is infertile too. Houellebecq, the one outside the book I’m not sure about the one inside the book, usually brings up the themes of the politics of sex and the way lust motivates all aspects of our lives, but in this book he just settles for some philosophical musings on prostitutes. This is the third book I’ve read by him and this is the book he spends the least amount of time talking about sex… libido slowing down Mr. Houellebecq?In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. At some point later in the book, someone observes that the map is more interesting than the territory. Contemplating (and rendering) the world is more interesting than being involved in it.

Historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith concluded his eponymous essay collection, Map is not Territory with a rejoinder to scholars that echoes the Borgesian analysis (1978, p.309): Enfin, des pronostics sur l'avenir de la France que Jed prophétise comme un pays où l'économie serait de plus en plus essentiellement agricole et touristique.Le père de Jed, qui travaille comme membre d'un cabinet d'architecte, est aussi créateur en rêve d'architectures utopiques, qui restent au stade d'esquisses et d'ébauches, refusées par tous les commanditaires. Il défend une conception organique et recluse de l'architecture, au rebours des écoles fonctionnalistes dominantes. Unfortunately, there's still some sloppiness of argument and presentation; Houellebecq's canvas is pretty much as messy as usual, just not as loud. The focus of the project is on Ghirri’s quietly compelling project to create a new kind of geography, located in his fascination with representations of the world, in the form of reproductions, pictures, posters, models and maps. The mediation of experience through images in an Italy poised between the old and the new was, for Ghirri, an inexhaustible terrain to survey – “a great adventure into the world of thinking and looking, a wonderful magic toy that miraculously manages to combine our adult awareness and the fairy tale world of children…a never-ending journey through great and small, through variations and the realm of illusions and appearances, a labyrinthine specular place of multitudes and simulation."

I suppose you could dissect this. Jed first photographed still life, then machine parts. He has an epiphany and begins to photograph Michelin maps. This is how he made his first millions. It's how he meets the delightful Olga. And it's how we have the supposed theme of this book, printed in capital letters in case we missed the significance: THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY.Michel Houellebecq, είτε γιατί είχα ήδη υπόψη μου μερικούς από τους χαρακτηρισμούς που (δικαίως ή αδίκως, δεν θα το κρίνω εγώ) του έχουν κατά καιρούς αποδοθεί με αφορμή κάποιες απόψεις του: μισογύνης, ρατσιστής, αντισημίτης κ.α.. Από την άλλη, βέβαια, ήξερα πως πρόκειται για έναν αναντίρρητα σπουδαίο συγγραφέα και πως ειδικά στον Χάρτη και στην Επικράτεια συμβαίνει το εξής (λογοτεχνικά) ιδιοφυές: ο ίδιος ο συγγραφέας γίνεται μέρος της ιστορίας που διηγείται (σε τρίτο πρόσωπο), διαδραματίζοντας σημαντικό ρόλο στην εξέλιξή της, καθώς, μεταξύ άλλων, στα μισά του βιβλίου θα βρεθεί φριχτά δολοφονημένος (κυριολεκτικά κατακρεουργημένος!) στο καθιστικό του σπιτιού του και η μισή Εθνική Αστυν� Martin's life is well-to-do Parisian, but mundane. He has an extended affair, off and on, with a Russian media executive named Olga. She is one hot babe, apparently, but even she can't hold his interest. She did abandon him for a time, and perhaps an infantile ego can never forgive the ultimate insult of abandonment. Korzybski, Alfred (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness..