What’s on Contempo

The first Contempo book club of 2012 will take you through the wonderfully strange and subversive world created by Michel Houellebecq in The map and the territory, the author’s fifth novel and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize. Examine the art world according to Houellebecq via police procedures, realistic fictional characters and utterly improbably figures who are in fact taken from real life.

This debut novel will take readers back to the days of the Leningrad seige of 1941 and one woman’s quest to preserve priceless works of art in the Hermitage Museum.

Working tirelessly with museum colleagues, Marina manages to place many works into safekeeping with the hope that one day, when the war is over, they will again grace the walls. Now in present-day America, the courageous Marina still has a deep emotional connection with these artworks and her past in Russia but finds her connection with everyday life becoming increasingly tenuous.

Described as one of the most original, enjoyable, and informative publications about art in our time, the book acts as a chronology of the nine months that the author sat for one of the world’s leading portrait painters Lucian Freud.