Submission
A Novel
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4.1 • 93 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny new novel from France's most famous literary figure
Paris, 2022. François is bored. He's a middle-aged lecturer at the Sorbonne 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, reads the classics, queues up YouPorn.
Meanwhile, it's election season. And although Francois feels "about as politicized as a hand 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 Francois is offered an irresistible academic advancement--on condition that he convert to Islam.
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker has said of this novel 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 Submission may be satirical and melancholic, but it is also hilarious; a comic masterpiece by one of France's great novelists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's hard to overstate the controversy that has hounded Houellebecq's Submission since its publication in France which coincided with the attacks on the office of Charlie Hebdo and the persistent accusations of Islamophobia might well color the reception of the English-language translation (by Lorin Stein of the Paris Review). This would be a travesty. The novel's moral complexity, concerned above all with how politics shape or annihilate personal ethics, is singular and brilliant. An expert on the works of J.K. Huysmans, Fran ois is a lonely professor at a semi-prestigious Paris university; subsisting on frozen dinners and occasional sex, he is politically indifferent. Nonetheless, he is forced to take notice when the Muslim Brotherhood, under the leadership of the charismatic Mohammed Ben Abbes, comes to power in an electoral coup. Fran ois's colleagues scramble to adapt to (or resist) the now non-secular university's policies, as women are excluded from teaching and a Muslim-friendly president is installed. Fran ois travels to the monastery where Huysmans himself took refuge, knowing that if he returns to Paris, he will find a changed country. Eventually, he will have to reckon with his own convictions or join the bulk of his fellow intellectuals in convenient conversion to the new regime. 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.
Customer Reviews
A wonderful satire of French academia
I am stunned at how many reviewers took this as serious and not satire. The author is plainly making fun of the professors and members of the cultural left who believe that the clash of civilizations now going on in France will end up well for them.
Dark, Brilliant, Provocative
"Submission" is worth a read for anyone either convinced that the path we are following in the West is a triumphant march toward universal rights or the path of cultural and ethnic suicide.
At turns bleak, darkly amusing and obviously provocative, it challenges readers by asking them to consider their bland, mass media-spoon fed reflexive beliefs through the story of existential hero who takes a rather surprising turn for someone who starts off sounding like a descendant of an Albert Camus character.
Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, a must-read.