Houellebecq and Wikipedia

There were signs that the former enfant terrible of French fiction was going soft when Michel Houellebecq included an Acknowledgements page at the end of his most recent novel La Carte et le territoire (2010). Acknowledgements, Houellebecq?!

Among those thanked were the novelist's publisher Teresa Cremesi and a police officer who had provided him with information he used in the rather unconvincing police-procedural section of the book. The new English translation (by Gavin Bowd, published by Heinemann) goes one stage further: in it the author thanks "Wikipedia . . . and its contributors whose entries I have occasionally used as a source of inspiration, notably those concerning the housefly, the town of Beauvais and Frédéric Nihous [a minor French politician]". Is this, one wonders, the first occasion on which the author of a novel thanks Wikipedia in the Acknowledgements?

Although it is tempting to take the gesture with a pinch of salt (Houellebecq being something of a joker), it's also worth remembering that the author was accused of plagiarism by the website Slate when the novel came out in France. He brushed off his accusers, branding them imbeciles and suggesting that they didn't understand how fiction works. The novel went on to win the Prix Goncourt.The English translation (which comes dressed in a rather unattractive bubble-wrap) faithfully reflects the French title: The Map and the Territory. This hasn't always been the case. Houellebecq's first novel, the wonderfully titled Extension du domaine de la lutte appeared in English as the flip Whatever. "Extension of the domain of the struggle" might have been a bit much on the other hand, but still . . . . Les Particules élémentaires, Houellebecq's best novel to date, appeared in English as Atomised, where the more straightforward "The Elementary Particles" might have been preferable, given that one of the half-brothers at the heart of the story, Michel, is a molecular biologist. The temptation to play fast and loose with Houellebecq's choice of words should be resisted; after all, whatever else he is, no one would deny that he is a great stylist who chooses his words extremely carefully.