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A controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny new novel from France's most famous living literary figure
It's 2022. François is bored. He's a middle-aged lecturer at the New Sorbonne University and an expert on J. K. Huysmans, the famous nineteenth-century Decadent author. But François's own decadence is considerably smaller in scale. He sleeps with his students, eats microwave dinners, rereads Huysmans, queues up YouPorn.
Meanwhile, it's election season. And although Francois feels "about as political as a bath towel," things are getting pretty interesting. In an alliance with the Socialists, France's new Islamic party sweeps to power. Islamic law comes into force. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and François is offered an irresistible academic advancement--on the condition that he convert to Islam.
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker has said of Submission that "Houellebecq is not merely a satirist but--more unusually--a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind." Michel Houellebecq's new book may be satirical and melancholic, but it is also hilarious, a comic masterpiece by one of France's great novelists.
- Sales Rank: #18954 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-20
- Released on: 2015-10-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.55" h x .97" w x 5.73" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Review
"Submission may be the most relevant book of the year." ―Daniel D'Addario, Time
"Houellebecq is considered a great contemporary author, and one cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature without reading his work . . . What prevents me from reading Houellebecq and watching von Trier is a kind of envy ― not that I begrudge them success, but by reading the books and watching the films I would be reminded of how excellent a work of art can be, and of how far beneath that level my own work is." ―Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New York Times Book Review
“The political elements of Submission are so comically exaggerated that it's hard to take them very seriously . . . This is the novel's big joke. It's designed to agitate the right by suggesting the right may have a point about the erosion of France's national culture, and to tweak the left by lending ironic credence to the right's fears . . . The only time Houellebecq seems not to be joking is when Francois speaks about literature . . . Whatever it says or doesn't say about Europe and Islam, Submission is a love letter to the novel itself.” ―Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine
“Houellebecq's recent work―especially The Map and the Territory, one of the finest novels of the 21st century―is elegant, sad, all the more discomfiting in that we never quite know how much subtlety to credit the author with. Houellebecq writes on shifting sands. But I think he might just be permanent.” ―Michael Robbins, The Chicago Tribune
“In Submission, Houellebecq is no less afraid to foment than in previous works, but his audacity serves a purpose that may not be immediately evident. His goal in this quasi-dystopian novel is to cast a light on contemporary French society and the deficiencies he perceives and to suggest that the future he predicts isn't wholly beyond the realm of possibility . . . A challenging satire that, at its best, is subtler than its author's reputation might lead you to expect.” ―Michael Margas, The San Francisco Chronicle
“Houellebec's deadpan comedic edge . . . defies the reader to find the line between parody and philosophy . . . What Houellebecq has done in Submission is hold up a mirror to his readers. The charge is that he inflames animosity by depicting a Muslim-influenced France as something of which Europeans should be frightened. But he puts readers and critics in the position of having to specify what exactly is frightening about this France.” ―S. Mark Heim, The Christian Century
“Michel Houellebecq: butcher. Messy slaughterer of sacred cows. Disembowler of all modes of political correctness, from the myth of the modern male's respect for women to the laughable fiction of the liberal Westerner's respect for non-Western cultures. That's the story, anyway. Like most good stories, it isn't true, for the most part . . . [Submission] is a work of genius, sure―with Houellebecq that goes without saying. But it's not a slaughterhouse. It's a upper-middle-class supermarket, brightly but not harshly lit, stocked with sushi, expensive cheeses, organic vegetables, olive oils, and honeys. It's not food for thought. It's an empty stomach. It's heartbreaking. It's utopia.” ―Micaela Morrissette, Bomb
“The prose, which never fails to be consistent and accessible, continued to impress page after page . . . Perhaps the highest achievement of [Submission] is the way it manages to be a satire with a core of deep humanism running through it.” ―Popmatters
“Extraordinary . . . if there is anyone in literature today, not just in French but worldwide, who is thinking about the sort of enormous shifts we all feel are happening, it’s [Houellebecq].” ―Emmanuel Carrere, Le Monde
“A work of real literary distinction . . . [Houellebecq] has been the novelist who has most fearlessly and presciently tackled the rise of Islamic extremism in recent years . . . He is a writer with a gift for telling the truth, unlike any other in our time – I’ve been consistently saying he is the writer who matters most to me for many years now. I’ve read Submission twice in the last week with ever growing admiration and enjoyment. There’s been no English-language novel this good lately. With Submission Houellebecq has inserted himself right into the centre of the intellectual debate that was already raging in France about Islam and identity politics . . . There is nobody else writing now more worth reading.” ―David Sexton, Evening Standard
“Houellebecq has an unerring, Balzacian flair for detail, and his novels provide an acute, disenchanted anatomy of French middle-class life . . . Houellebecq writes about Islam with curiosity, fascination, even a hint of envy.” ―Adam Shatz, London Review of Books
“[Submission's] moral complexity, concerned above all with how politics shape-or annihilate-personal ethics, is singular and brilliant . . . This novel is not a paranoid political fantasy; it merely contains one. Houellebecq's argument becomes an investigation of the content of ideology, and he has written an indispensable, serious book that returns a long-eroded sense of consequence, immediacy, and force to contemporary literature.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About the Author
Michel Houellebecq is a French novelist, poet, and literary critic. His novels include the international bestseller The Elementary Particles and The Map and the Territory, which won the 2010 Prix Goncourt. He lives in France.
Most helpful customer reviews
36 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
A sociologist's dream of a novel
By Carolyn Kost
This novel is far more a portrait of contemporary society than any inflammatory depiction of Islam. Houellebecq's protagonist, Francois, is the modern human who goes through life devoid of meaning, passion, any cherished human connection or deeply held beliefs. Sex and gourmandise fail to provide even momentary joy. His academic pursuits at least provide diversion and prestige, but they are not particularly fulfilling. This regime, that regime; it's hard to see how it could make any substantive difference to Francois.
This is the masterful means by which we come to observe several sociological truths. First, nature abhors a vacuum; ergo those who do believe in something will trump the apathetic, the nihilist, and the anomic. Second, the family is a core unit of society; ergo the fraying of ties accompanied by the increased atomization of the individual poses a threat to the societal tapestry that must be addressed. Religions and other ideologies tend to fill the interstices, the cracks that form, rather effectively in a society. The filler in the 2022 France of Submission is a moderate Islam, a religion that already had traction due to Islamic immigration and a high birth rate.
Rest assured that no terrorism is involved; that would be "amateurish" and repugnant. The multiple parties vying for power in France fracture the political system enough to allow the Islamic party to assume power with just 22% of the vote. Those who believe the events described to be totally implausible must not know history. Having lived in places where regime change dramatically transformed societies virtually overnight, I disagree vehemently. As for the criticism that a university would never allow itself to be subsumed into such an ideology, I counter with a decade of teaching experience in the university and another decade as a keen observer. Intellectuals can be co-opted and paid off as easily as other segments of society and are--witness the endowed chairs and the political bent they often have that supports the donors' so neatly. In Submission's Université of Paris, there is abundant money flowing from the Gulf States to fund it all; salaries rise astronomically and those employees who no longer fit are paid sumptuous pensions. Why complain? Now they're free to do their research without the pesky teaching responsibilities. The regime change privileges males: patriarchy is acknowledged as reflective of the order and hierarchy present in nature. Women are relegated to the domestic sphere; polygamy becomes normalized. Again, those privileged by the system are unlikely to complain.
This is a compelling page turner of a novel. It is intelligently written and as a result makes the reader feel smart. It does what great literature should do: it illuminates aspects of the human experience that are both changeless and quite specific to our time. Houellebecq reveals that, despite our disavowals, the undeniable human craving for the meaning and connection that is lacking in their lives can lead them down some rather unexpected paths.
62 of 71 people found the following review helpful.
How Islam gains control in 2022
By Ralph Blumenau
WARNING: Some spoiler material in this review as far as the plot is concerned - but the heart of the matter lies in the arguments involved.
The story takes its time to start on its main subject, the rise to power of Islam in France in the presidential elections of 2022. It begins with François, the narrator, in his early forties, a randy Professor of Literature at the Sorbonne and a serial bedder of his female students. He describes his sexual activities with them in explicit detail. But he also talks about his study of the admired but decadent Huysmans, and about other French writers; about his worry about his sexual decline; about his lack of interest in his teaching; and about his lack of interest in political activity: “I was about as political as a bath towel”. But he has noted that the worn-out alternation between Center-Right and Center-Left governments in France was quite disconnected from what was happening in France: the growth of the vigorous Front National and of the vigorous Muslim Brotherhood. The media no longer thought, as the had done in earlier days, that the race riots which broke out every now and then in the suburbs were particularly significant.
And now, in the first round of the Presidential election the Center-Right and the Center-Left candidates were eliminated, so the second round would be between the Front National and the Muslim Brotherhood. Between the first and the second round, many people are beginning to panic, fearful of either result or indeed of civil war. François’ Jewish girl friend leaves for Israel. University people are particularly fearful, for the Muslim Brotherhood had made it clear that, while they could compromise on many things to get the Socialists to support them in the second round, they were adamant that they must have control of education. .
To keep the Front National out, the Centre-Right and Centre-Left made a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, agreed to support its leader, the apparently moderate Ben Abbes, for President and François Bayrou of the Centre-Right as Prime Minister. Abbes wins the second round by a landslide. He is an invention, but Bayrou is in fact a present-day politician: he ran for President in 2012 and is a political Catholic, and in this story his alliance with Abbes is one against the secularism of the French Republic. Other present-day politicians figure also: well-known ones like Marine Le Pen and others who will mean more to French readers than to those who do not follow French politics closely.
Abbes brings the North African states into the European Union (how he does that is not explained). He introduces a new economic system, based on the family - women are encouraged to leave employment - and small family businesses: big organizations and state programmes like welfare are dissolved. In many ways life in Paris is quickly transformed. Above all, the Sorbonne is immediately taken over by the Muslims; only teachers who will convert to Islam are kept on and François is dismissed with a handsome pension.
Adrift and depressed, François first goes to stay for a while at the abbey near Poitiers where the aesthete Huysmans, disillusioned with the philistine culture of his time, had taken his monastic vows. It doesn’t work for him. Then the new head of the Sorbonne, who, convinced that European civilization was decaying, had converted to Islam in 2013, would like him back on the faculty and plies him with arguments why he should abandon his atheism. At the end we see François anticipating his conversion to Islam, his motives for this being a mixture of the elevated and the mundane and earthy.
He has submitted himself to Islam - but the title of the novel also plays on the submission of women to men, which also appeals to him.
I have outlined the plot, but the intellectual heart of the book lies in the variety of subtle, lucid and seductive discussions about the issues involved; and the translation by Lorin Stein reads fluently. We need not think that they are Houellebecque’s own arguments: I think he tries to explain the attraction and growing power of Islam. He has the reputation of a satirist, so he may even be satirizing the arguments he displays - if so, the novel is without the bite that satirical writing usually has.
It is rather a short novel of 250 pages, but some of it strikes me as padding it out with aspects of his life which are not relevant to the books main theme (or rather themes, for François’ erotic interests are clearly another one.)
27 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
2022: Masochism and Corruption
By H. Schneider
In the not so distant future, after the 2022 presidential elections, the Muslim Brotherhood will take the leadership role in France's government, in a coalition with Socialists and Conservatives. Those two parties cooperate with the Brotherhood in order to prevent a victory by the right wing National Front.
We are told this by a narrator with a rather passive nature and attitude, a literature professor in his 40s, with a talent for apathy. He has no convictions and no 'life'. His love life consists of affairs with his students. After the new government takes over, all professors at public universities must convert. Initially, our hero refuses and gets terminated. Later he sees the light, in his own opportunistic way, and submits. His pension and savings would have permitted some access to high class escort services, but the prospects were dim. Submission to new political needs has clear advantages.
One of his exes ascribes 'abnormal honesty' to his character. We can safely assume that to be a coquettish self description of M. Wellbeck. The man is a phenomenon, literally and literarily. Politically too. The book arrived in the market during the days of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Houellebecq is a clear sighted political analyst, in addition to everything else that is also true about him.
I enjoy the author's provocative stance and language. His dystopian view of Europe's future is hard to argue with.
There are other aspects that I appreciate less.
One complaint is of a technical nature: to make the plot work narratively, the author invents a secret service man, a husband of another professor, who explains backgrounds to the hero and provides him with conspiracy theories. I find that an overly contrived approach.
Another issue: in his generally provocative way, the author tends to produce nonsensical generalizations, that irritate me. Example: he claims that all prostitutes dream secretly, and by their nature, of becoming 'cooking pot women'.
Or silly quips like: civil war and duck confit are incompatible.
Such nonsense reduces the fun for me.
My conclusion: provocative, entertaining, informative, but also annoying.
In a way, Houellebecq squandered his subject. The book is not funny enough for full- blown satire, nor serious enough for political analysis. Still, as far as social dystopia is concerned, I see this novel in a class with Dave Eggers' Circle.
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