Una novela total: thriller con flecos esotéricos, obra de crítica política, descarnado retrato familiar y narración existencial sobre el dolor y el amor.

Año 2027. Francia se prepara para unas elecciones presidenciales que es muy posible que gane una estrella de la televisión. El hombre fuerte detrás de esa candidatura es el actual ministro de Economía y Finanzas, Bruno Juge, para quien trabaja como asesor Paul Raison, el protagonista de la novela, un hombre taciturno y descreído.

De pronto, en internet empiezan a aparecer extraños vídeos amenazantes –en uno de los cuales se guillotina al ministro Juge– con unos enigmáticos símbolos geométricos. Y la violencia pasa del mundo virtual al real: la explosión de un carguero en A Coruña, un atentado contra un banco de semen en Dinamarca y el sangriento ataque a una embarcación de migrantes en las costas mallorquinas. ¿Quién está detrás de estos hechos? ¿Grupos antiglobalización? ¿Fundamentalistas? ¿Acaso satanistas?

Mientras Paul Raison indaga lo que está sucediendo, su relación matrimonial se descompone y su padre, espía jubilado de la DGSI, sufre un infarto cerebral y queda paralizado. El hecho propicia el reencuentro de Paul con sus hermanos: una hermana católica y simpatizante de la ultraderecha casada con un notario en paro, y un hermano restaurador de tapices casado con una periodista de segunda fila amargada y de colmillo retorcido. Y además Paul deberá enfrentar una crisis personal al serle diagnosticada una grave enfermedad...

Houellebecq orquesta una ambiciosa novela total que es muchas cosas a la vez: un thriller con flecos esotéricos, una obra de crítica política, un descarnado retrato familiar y también una narración íntima y existencial sobre el dolor, la muerte y el amor, que acaso sea lo único que puede redimirnos y salvarnos.

Una novela provocadora y apocalíptica que, como suele ser habitual en Houellebecq, deslumbrará o escandalizará. Lo que es seguro es que no dejará a nadie indiferente, porque el autor tiene la inusual virtud de sacudir conciencias.

El autor de las más vitriólicas novelas sobre la sociedad contemporánea pasea su feroz mirada sobre algunos fenómenos culturales y sociales del siglo XX: ataca el «repugnante realismo poético» de Prévert; realiza un apasionado elogio del cine mudo; considera la poesía no sólo como otro lenguaje, sino como «otra mirada»; afirma que en el sexo no se busca placer, sino la gratificación narcisista; nos habla de la muerte de Dios como preludio de un increíble folletín metafísico; del arte contemporáneo; de una visita al salón del vídeo hot y de la clonación. Un libro transgresor sobre el mundo como supermercado y como burla.

Francia, elecciones presidenciales de 2022. Mohammed Ben Abbes, islamista moderado, derrota a la candidata del Frente Nacional en la segunda vuelta. François, un profesor universitario hastiado de la docencia y de su vida sexual, ve cómo una rápida transformación altera la vida de los franceses. Los judíos han emigrado a Israel, las mujeres han cambiado las faldas por conjuntos de blusa larga y pantalón y algunos comercios han cerrado las puertas o reorientado el negocio. Y la Sorbona es ahora una universidad islámica en la que los profesores conversos gozan de excelentes salarios y tienen derecho a la poligamia. Al igual que Huysmans, el escritor convertido al catolicismo al que consagró su tesis, François sopesará pronunciar las palabras que le abrirán las puertas del islam y de una nueva vida: «No hay sino un dios y Mahoma es su profeta.»

Una novela de «política ficción» –como 1984 y Un mundo feliz–, una turbadora fábula política y moral, en la que coexisten intuiciones poéticas, efectos cómicos y una melancolía fatalista.

" Pendant toutes les années de ma triste jeunesse, Huysmans demeura pour moi un compagnon, un ami fidèle jamais je n'éprouvai de doute, jamais je ne fus tenté d'abandonner, ni de m'orienter vers un autre sujet puis, une après-midi de juin 2007, après avoir longtemps attendu, après avoir tergiversé autant et même un peu plus qu'il n'était admissible, je soutins devant le jury de l'université Paris IV - Sorbonne ma thèse de doctorat : Joris-Karl Huysmans, ou la sortie du tunnel.
" Dans une France assez proche de la nôtre, un homme s'engage dans la carrière universitaire. Peu motivé par l'enseignement, il s'attend à une vie ennuyeuse mais calme, protégée des grands drames historiques. Cependant les forces en jeu dans le pays ont fissuré le système politique jusqu'à provoquer son effondrement. Cette implosion sans soubresauts, sans vraie révolution, se développe comme un mauvais rêve.
Le talent de l'auteur, sa force visionnaire nous entraînent sur un terrain ambigu et glissant son regard sur notre civilisation vieillissante fait coexister dans ce roman les intuitions poétiques, les effets comiques, une mélancolie fataliste. Ce livre est une saisissante fable politique et morale.

»Es ist nicht die Zukunft, es ist die Gegenwart, die dich tötet, die wiederkommt, um an dir zu nagen.«

In SEROTONIN rechnet die Hauptfigur ab: mit der modernen Gesellschaft, der Wirtschaft, der Politik – und mit sich selbst.

»Der umwerfendste Schriftsteller unserer Gegenwart«
Julia Encke, F.A.S

As the 2022 French Presidential election looms, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and the charismatic Muhammed Ben Abbes of the growing Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the political left to block the Front National’s alarming ascendency, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. This proves to be the death knell of French secularism, as Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for our narrator François – misanthropic, middle-aged and alienated – life is set on a new course.

Submission is a devastating satire, comic and melancholy by turns, and a profound meditation on faith and meaning in Western society.

In his new work, Michel Houellebecq combines erotic provocation with a terrifying vision of a world teetering between satiety and fanaticism, to create one of the most shocking, hypnotic, and intelligent novels in years.

In his early forties, Michel Renault skims through his days with as little human contact as possible. But following his father’s death he takes a group holiday to Thailand where he meets a travel agent—the shyly compelling Valérie—who begins to bring this half-dead man to life with sex of escalating intensity and audacity. Arcing with dreamlike swiftness from Paris to Pattaya Beach and from sex clubs to a terrorist massacre, Platform is a brilliant, apocalyptic masterpiece by a man who is widely regarded as one of the world’s most original and daring writers.

Konstnären Jed Martin är en typisk Houellebecq-gestalt i yngre medelåldern: alienerad och tämligen ointresserad av sitt eget liv. Han når stora framgångar, först med en utställning där han har fotograferat Michelin-kartor och sedan med en serie porträtt av kända och okända människor i deras arbetsmiljö. Bland dem finns den uppburne författaren Michel Houllebecq, som också kommer att skriva en lång text till utställningskatalogen. Efter halva romanen kommer en oväntad vändning; ett brutalt mord. Poliskommissarien Jasselin, som leder undersökningen, får anledning att rannsaka sitt eget liv. En oväntat stillsam och melankolisk roman av den franska litteraturens enfant terrible.

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker, an idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust being all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections.

Atomised tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is the dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls' magazines.

Florent-Claude Labrouste ma 46 lat, nie znosi swojego imienia i faszeruje się captorixem, lekiem antydepresyjnym wyzwalającym serotoninę, który ma trzy działania niepożądane: mdłości, utrata libido i impotencja. Jego podróż zaczyna się w Almerii, prowadzi przez Paryż i Normandię, gdzie rolnicy szykują się do ulicznej wojny. Francja idzie na dno, Unia Europejska idzie na dno, na dno idzie bezcelowe życie Florenta-Claude’a. Miłość to mrzonka. Seks – katastrofa. Nawet kultura, dzieła Prousta czy Manna, nie jest ostatnią deską ratunku.
Florent-Claude odkrywa lubieżne fimiki porno, w których występuje jego nowa dziewczyna z Japonii, rzuca pracę i przeprowadza się do hotelu. Włóczy się po mieście, filozofuje i wygłasza tyrady. Analizuje swoje związki miłosne, zawsze naznaczone porażką. Spotyka się ze starym przyjacielem arystokratą, którego życie wydawało się idealne, ale już takie nie jest, bo żona zostawiła go i zabrała ze sobą dwie córki. I ten przyjaciel uczy go obsługiwać karabin…
Michel Houellebecq, jasno rozumujący nihilista, tworzy postać narratora pozbawionego korzeni, obsesyjnego i autodestrukcyjnego, który przygląda się swojemu życiu i otaczającemu go światu z opryskliwym humorem i rozdzierającą wrogością. „Serotonina” pokazuje, że nadal jest bezlitosnym kronikarzem dekadencji społeczeństwa zachodniego XXI wieku.

Michel Houellebecq's Serotonin is a scathing, frightening, hilarious, raunchy, offensive, politically incorrect novel about the current state of Europe, Western civilization, and mankind in general.
Deeply depressed by his romantic and professional failures, the aging hedonist and agricultural engineer Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is "dying of sadness." His young girlfriend hates him, his career is pretty much over, and he has to keep himself highly medicated to cope with day-to-day city life.
Struggling with "sex, male angst, solitude, consumerism, globalisation, urban planning, and more sex" (The Economist), Labrouste decides to head for the hills, returning to Normandy, where he once worked promoting regional cheeses, and where, too, he had once been in love, and even—it now seems—happy. There he finds a countryside devastated by globalization and European agricultural policies, and local farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an impossible return to what they remember as a golden age: the smaller world of the premodern era.
As the farmers prepare for what might be an armed insurrection, it becomes clear that the health of one miserable body and a suffering body politic are not so different, in the end, and that all concerned may be rushing toward a catastrophe a whole drugstore's worth of antidepressants won't be enough to make bearable.

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time.
Houellebecq's debut novel is painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life.

'Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.' In this prescient work, now with an introduction by Stephen King, Michel Houellebecq, the controversial and bestselling author of ATOMISED, focuses his considerable analytical skills on H.P. Lovecraft, one of the seminal horror writers of the early 20th century. Houellebecq's insights into the craft of writing illuminate both Lovecraft and Houellebecq's own work. The two are kindred spirits, sharing a uniquely dark worldview. But even as he outlines Lovecraft's rejection of this loathsome world, it is Houellebecq's adulation for the author that drives this work and makes it a love song, infusing the writing with an energy and passion that characterises Houellebecq's new novel. This is indispensable reading for anyone interested in Lovecraft, Houellebecq, or the past and future of horror.

Who, among you, deserves eternal life?
Daniel is a highly successful stand-up comedian who has made a career out of playing outrageously on the prejudices of his public. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, he has begun to detest laughter in particular and mankind in general. Despite this, Daniel is unable to stop himself believing in the possibility of love.
A thousand years on, war, drought and earthquakes have decimated the earth and Daniel24 lives alone in a secure compound - his only companion, a cloned dog named Fox. Outside, the remnants of the human race roam in packs, while Daniel24 attempts to decipher his predecessor's history. In a nightmarish vision of the implosion of the modern world, he, like his predecessor attempts to fathom the meaning of love, sex, suffering and regret.
'His deftly constructed novel is a bleak comment on contemporary society, at times funny, brutal and revolting.'
THE ECONOMIST
Text extract from
The Possibility of an Island
Michel Houellebecq
Welcome to eternal life, my friends. This book owes its existence to Harriet Wolff, a German journalist I met in Berlin a few years ago. Before putting her questions to me, Harriet wanted to recount a little fable. For her, this fable encapsulated my position as a writer.
I am in a telephone box, after the end of the world. I can make as many telephone calls as I like, there is no limit. I have no idea if anyone else has survived, or if my calls are just the monologues of a lunatic. Sometimes the call is brief, as if someone has hung up on me; sometimes it goes on for a while, as if someone is listening with guilty curiosity. There is neither day nor night; the situation is without end.
Welcome to eternal life, Harriet.
Who, among you, deserves eternal life?
My current incarnation is deteriorating; I do not think it will last much longer. I know that in my next incarnation I will be reunited with my companion, the little dog Fox.
The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact that it is possible to make him happy; he demands such simple things, his ego is so limited. Possibly, in a previous era, women found themselves in a comparable situation similar to that of domestic animals. Undoubtedly there used to be a form of domotic happiness, connected to the functioning of the whole, which we are no longer able to understand; there was undoubtedly the pleasure of constituting a functional organism, one that was adequate, conceived with the purpose of accomplishing a discrete series of tasks and these tasks, through repetition, constituted a discrete series of days. All that has disappeared, along with the series of tasks; we no longer really have any specific objective; the joys of humans remain unknowable to us, inversely, we cannot be torn apart by their sorrows. Our nights are no longer shaken by terror or by ecstasy. We live, however; we go through life, without joy and without mystery; time seems brief to us.
The first time I met Marie22 was on a cheap Spanish server; the connection times were appallingly long.
The weariness brought on
By the old dead Dutchman
Is not something attested
Well before the master's return.
2711, 325104, 13375317, 452626. At the address indicated I was shown an image of her pussy jerky, pixellated, but strangely real. Was she alive, dead or an intermediary? Most likely an intermediary, I think; but it was something you did not talk about.
Women give an impression of eternity, as though their pussy were connected to mysteries as though it were a tunnel opening on to the essence of the world, when in fact it is just a hole for dwarves, fallen into disrepair. If they can give us this impression, then good for them; my words are meant sympathetically.
The immobile grace,
Conspicuously crushing,
Flowing from the passage of civilisations,
Does not have death as corollary.
I should have stopped. Stopped the game, the intermediation, the contact; but it was too late. 258, 129, 3727313, 11324410.
The first sequence was filmed from a hill. Immense sheets of grey plastic covered the plain; we were north of Almeria. The harvesting of the fruit and vegetables that grew beneath the plastic used to be done by agricultural labourers most often of Moroccan origin. After mechanisation was introduced, the workers evaporated into the surrounding sierras.
In addition to the usual equipment electric generator powering the protective fence, satellite network, sensors the unit Proyecciones XXI.13 also benefited from a generator of mineral salts and its own source of drinking water. It was far away from the main thoroughfares, and did not figure on any of the recent maps its construction came after the last surveys. Since the cessation of all air traffic and the permanent jamming of satellite transmission frequencies, it had become virtually impossible to locate.
The following sequence could have been a dream. A man with my face was eating a yoghurt in a steel mill; the manual for the machine tools was written in Turkish. It was unlikely that production would start up again.
12, 12, 533, 8467.
The second message from Marie22 was worded thus:
I am alone like a silly cu**
With my
Cu**
245535, 43, 3. When I say 'I', I am lying. Let us posit the 'I' of perception neutral and limpid. Put it next to the 'I' of intermediation when you look at it this way, my body belongs to me; or, more exactly, I belong to my body. What do we observe? An absence of contact. Fear what I say.
I do not want to keep you outside this book; living or dead, you are readers. Reading is done outside of me; and I want it to be done in this way, in silence.
Contrary to received ideas, Words don't create a world; Man speaks like a dog barks To express his anger, or his fear. Pleasure is silent, Just like the state of happiness.
The self is the synthesis of our failures; but it is only a partial synthesis. Fear what I say.
This book is intended for the edification of the Future Ones. Men, they will tell themselves, were able to produce this. It is not nothing; it is not everything; we are dealing with an intermediary production.
Marie22, if she exists, is a woman to the same extent that I am a man; to a limited, refutable extent. I too am approaching the end of my journey. No one will be present at the birth of the Spirit, except for the Future Ones; but the Future Ones are not beings, in our sense of the word. Fear what I say.
PART ONE COMMENTARY OF DANIEL24
DANIEL1, 1
Now, what does a rat do when it's awake? It sniffs about.
Jean-Didier biologist
How vividly I remember the first moments of my vocation as a clown! I was seventeen at the time, and spending a rather dreary month in an all-inclusive resort in Turkey it was, incidentally, the last time I was to go on holiday with my parents. My silly bitch of a sister she was thirteen at the time was just beginning to turn the guys on. It was at breakfast; as usual in the morning, a queue had formed in front of the scrambled eggs, something the holiday- makers seemed incredibly fond of. Next to me, an old English woman (desiccated, nasty, the kind who would cut up foxes to decorate her living room), who had already helped herself copiously to eggs, didn't hesitate to snaffle up the last three sausages on the hotplate. It was five to eleven, the breakfast service had come to an end, it was inconceivable that the waiter would bring out any more sausages. The German who was in the queue behind her became rigid; his fork, already reaching for a sausage, stopped in mid-air, and his face turned red with indignation. He was an enormous German, a colossus, more than two metres tall and weighing at least 150 kilos. I thought for a moment that he was going to plant his fork in the octogenarian's eyes, or grab her by the neck and smash her head on to the hotplates. She, with that senile, unconscious selfishness of old people, came trotting back to her table as if nothing had happened. The German was angry, I could sense that he was incredibly angry, but little by little his face grew calm, and he went off sadly, sausageless, in the direction of his compatriots.
Out of this incident I composed a little sketch about a bloody revolt in a holiday resort, sparked by the tiny details that contradicted the all-inclusive formula: a shortage of sausages at breakfast, followed by a supplemental charge for the mini-golf. That evening, I performed this sketch at the 'You have talent!' soiree (one evening every week the show was made up of turns done by the holiday- makers, instead of by professionals); I played all the characters, thus taking my first steps down the road of the one-man show, a road I scarcely left throughout my career. Nearly everyone came to the after-dinner show, as there was fu**-all to do until the discotheque opened; that meant an audience of 800 people. My sketch was a resounding success, people cried with laughter, and there was noisy applause. That very evening, at the discotheque, a pretty brunette called Sylvie told me I had made her laugh a lot, and that she liked boys with a sense of humour. Dear Sylvie. And so, in this way, my virginity was lost and my vocation decided.
After my baccalaureate, I signed up for acting lessons; there followed some inglorious years, during which I grew nastier and nastier and, as a consequence, more and more caustic; thanks to this, success finally arrived on a scale which surprised me. I had begun with small sketches on reunited immigrant families, journalists for Le Monde and the mediocrity of the middle classes in general I successfully captured the incestuous temptations of mid-career intellectuals aroused by their daughters or daughters- in-law, with their bare belly-buttons and thongs showing above their trousers. In short, I was a cutting observer of contemporary reality; I was often compared to Pierre Desproges. While continuing to devote myself to the one-man show, I occasionally accepted invitations to appear on television programmes, which I chose for their big audiences and general mediocrity. I never forgot to emphasise this mediocrity, albeit subtly: the presenter had to feel a little endangered, but not too much. All in all, I was a good professional; I was just a bit overrated. I was not the only one.
I don't mean that my sketches were unfunny; they were funny. I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality: we had simplified and pruned so much, broken so many barriers, taboos, misplaced hopes and false aspirations; truly, there was so little left. On the social level, there were the rich and the with a few fragile links between them the social ladder,a subject on which it was the done thing to joke; and the more serious possibility of being ruined. On the sexual level there were those who aroused desire, and those who did not: a tiny mechanism, with a few complications of modality (homosexuality, etc.), that could nevertheless be easily summarised as vanity and narcissistic competition, which had already been well described by the French moralists, three centuries before. There were also, of course, the honest folk, those who work, who ensure the effective production of wealth, also those who make sacrifices for their children in a manner that is rather comic or, if you like, pathetic (but I was, above all, a comedian); those who have neither beauty in their youth, nor ambition later, nor riches ever; but who hold on wholeheartedly, and more sincerely than anyone, to the values of beauty, youth, wealth, ambition and sex; those who, in some kind of way, make the sauce bind. Those people, I am afraid to say, could not constitute a subject. I did, however, include a few of them in my sketches to give diversity, and the reality effect; but I began all the same to get seriously tired. What's worse is that I was considered to be a humanist; a pretty abrasive humanist, but a humanist all the same. To give some context, here is one of the jokes that peppered my shows:
'Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina?'
'No.'
'The woman.'
Strangely, I managed to throw in that kind of thing, whilst still getting good reviews in Elle and Telerama; it's true that the arrival of the Arab immigrant comedians had validated macho excesses once more, and that I was genuinely excessive, albeit with grace: going close to the bone, repeatedly, but always staying in control. Finally, the benefit of the humorist's trade, or more generally of a humorous attitude in life, is to be able to behave like a complete bastard with impunity, and even to profit hugely from your depravity, in terms of sexual conquests and money, all with general approval.
My supposed humanism was, in reality, built on very thin foundations: a vague outburst against tobacconists, an allusion to the corpses of negro clandestines cast up on the Spanish coasts, had been enough to give me a reputation as a lefty and a defender of human rights. Me, a lefty? I had occasionally been able to introduce a few, vaguely young, anti-globalisation campaigners into my sketches, without giving them an immediately antipathetic role; I had occasionally indulged in a certain demagogy: I was, I repeat, a good professional. Besides, I looked like an Arab, which helps; the only residual ideological content of the left, in those days, was anti- racism, or more precisely anti-white racism. I did not in fact know the origins of these Arab features, which became more pronounced as the years went by: my mother was of Spanish origin and my father, as far as I know, was Breton. For example, my sister, that little bitch, was undoubtedly the Mediterranean type, but she wasn't half as dark as me, and her hair was straight. One had to wonder: had my mother always been scrupulously faithful? Or had I been engendered by some Mustapha? Or even another hypothesis by a Jew? Fu** that: Arabs came to my shows in droves Jews also, by the way, although in smaller numbers; and all these people paid for their tickets, at the full price. We all worry about the circumstances of our death; the circumstances of our birth, however, are less worrisome to us.
As for human rights, quite obviously I couldn't give a toss; I could hardly manage to be interested in the rights of my cock.
In that particular respect, the rest of my career had more or less confirmed my first success at the holiday club. Women in general lack a sense of humour, which is why they consider humour to be one of the virile qualities; throughout my career, opportunities for placing my organ in one of the appropriate orifices were never lacking. To tell the truth, such intercourse was never up to much: women who are interested in comedians are getting old, nearly forty, and are beginning to suspect that things are going to turn bad. Some of them had fat asses, others breasts like flannels, sometimes both. In other words, there was nothing arousing about them; and, anyway, when it's more and more difficult to get a hard-on, the interest goes. They weren't all that old, either; I knew that as they approached fifty they would once again long for something reassuring, easy and false and of course they wouldn't find it. In the meantime, I could only confirm to them completely unintentionally, believe me, it's never a pleasure the decline of their erotic value; I could only confirm their first suspicions, and instil in them, despite myself, a despairing view of life: no, it was not maturity that awaited them, but simply old age; there was not a new blossoming at the end of the road, but a bundle of frustrations and sufferings, at first insignificant, then very quickly unbearable; it wasn't very healthy, all that, not very healthy at all. Life begins at fifty, that's true; insomuch as it ends at forty.

A worldwide phenomenon and the most important French novelist since Camus, Michel Houellebecq now delivers his magnum opus–a tale of our present circumstances told from the future, when humanity as we know it has vanished.
Surprisingly poignant, philosophically compelling, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, The Possibility of an Island is at once an indictment, an elegy, and a celebration of everything we have and are at risk of losing. It is a masterpiece from one of the world’s most innovative writers.

The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time now delivers his magnum opus—about art and money, love and friendship and death, fathers and sons.
The Map and the Territory is the story of an artist, Jed Martin, and his family and lovers and friends, the arc of his entire history rendered with sharp humor and powerful compassion. His earliest photographs, of countless industrial objects, were followed by a surprisingly successful series featuring Michelin road maps, which also happened to bring him the love of his life, Olga, a beautiful Russian working—for a time—in Paris. But global fame and fortune arrive when he turns to painting and produces a host of portraits that capture a wide range of professions, from the commonplace (the owner of a local bar) to the autobiographical (his father, an accomplished architect) and from the celebrated (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology) to the literary (a writer named Houellebecq, with whom he develops an unusually close relationship).
Then, while his aging father (his only living relative) flirts with oblivion, a police inspector seeks Martin’s help in solving an unspeakably gruesome crime—events that prove profoundly unsettling. Even so, now growing old himself, Jed Martin somehow discovers serenity and manages to add another startling chapter to his artistic legacy, a deeply moving conclusion to this saga of hopes and losses and dreams.