I just had a nice talk with Boris Guina, a painter from Zagreb I met in Motovun several years ago. His wife, Mirela, is Irina Kosanović’s sister, and Irina is my next-door neighbor. Now, we talked about all sorts of things, including the books we had recently read. Thus he suggested that I read Michel Houellebecq’s fifth and much trumpeted novel, which dissects the world of contemporary art.[1] The topic is close to both of our hearts. To my surprise, I agreed straight away. Boris has become a good friend over the years. As soon as I return to Zagreb, I am sure to get the English translation of the French author’s book. And I am sure to read it from cover to cover. Now, this I take as the very definition of friendship. Reading a contemporary French author on anyone else’s advice would be simply unthinkable. Nay, absurd. Only friendship can make one undertake such an outrageous adventure. As well as carry it out without a moment’s thought.

Addendum (September 24, 2012)

I am a good boy. I bought the English translation of the book on September 21, the very day I came to Zagreb, and I started browsing through it from back to front and from front to back.[2] This is what I continued doing the next few days. At some point I drew a sad face next to a paragraph about the artist as a submissive creature, which annoyed me no end.[3] A while later I found a paragraph about the art market, and I drew a line next to it.[4] And then I drew a happy face in the margin next to a paragraph about Houellebecq himself, who appears as one of the main characters in his own book.[5] For all my random browsing, though, I could not read the book from cover to cover. Try as I might, I just could not. It is a novel, for crying out loud. In the end, I copied the paragraph about the art market into my own book of commonplaces (“There are No More Safe Investments,” September 23, 2012). It sounded just like something I would have written upon skimming through the Financial Times on the World Wide Web. And that was that. As good a boy as I surely am, reading a contemporary French novel from start to finish is simply beyond me. So much for the very definition of friendship, as well.

Footnotes

1. The Map and the Territory, Paris: Flammarion, 2010.

2. London: Vintage Books, 2012 (first published in 2010)

3. Op. cit., p. 66.

4. Op. cit., p. 270.

5. Op. cit., p. 9.