While not shedding any of the predictable Houellebecqian blackness, La carte is, assuming you know something of the Houellebecq story, his funniest book. There is a "mockumentary" portrait of the isolated writer, Houellebecq 2, whom Jed Martin approaches to write some copy for his catalogue, going to bed early and whingeing about the hostility he encounters in France. This is especially hilarious when you bear in mind that La carte et le territoire is short-listed for the Prix Goncourt and that, with all respect to Houellebecq's talent, he has almost made a separate career as a provocateur, firing off inflammatory remarks left and right. But then, the French have always liked their writers a little mephitic, from Villon onwards. Houellebecq's sensitivity to brickbats is as incongruous as Katie Price complaining about press intrusion.
Novelists have often killed off their most successful character (or attempted to), but Houellebecq goes one further. Not only does he get to write his own reviews in La carte et le territoire but he also manages to write his own obituary and to hear what people will say at his funeral. Houellebecq 2 is murdered in a grisly fashion, leading to a whodunnit section of the novel where Houellebecq gives Thomas Harris a run for his money in the weird serial killer stakes.
But the best parts of the novel as ever, are the details of ordinary life. Houellebecq has the ability to make vivid the mundane. Jed Martin's most stable long-term relationship turns out to be with the boiler in his flat, and his visit to his father in a care-home is heart-breaking.
The sense of isolation, alienation and despair that permeates the novels is also present in The Art of Struggle (Herla, £10.99), a collection of Houellebecq's poetry. Houellebecq started as a poet and this beautiful paperback is a parallel text edition. I'd quibble about the translation occasionally (the original French is Le sens du combat and struggle is not necessarily combat) except for the fact I wouldn't have the guts to attempt to translate poetry and that Houellebecq (who does speak English well) allegedly cast his eye over this rendering. When it comes to poetry, only a native speaker really has the right to judge, but it has to be said, as Verlaine once observed of Rimbaud, these are "honourable rhymes".
It's in the nature of the literary world that the winner tends to take all, and that in the British mind there tends to be one writer at a time from a country or a region. Houellebecq is quite firmly perched here as the French novelist, and if you can read French you'll enjoy La carte et le territoire, but there are other good writers in France. Also longlisted for the Prix Goncourt this year is Fouad Laroui's Une année chez les Français (Julliard, €19).
He's very different from Houellebecq, a straightforwardly comic writer, but you'll enjoy his account of life at a French lycée in Morocco.
