Submission

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Submission

$22.99

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This book is part of the The Houllebecq Collection. View the bundle and save.

★★★★★ Trusted by hundreds of readers worldwide

France Submits, and a Professor Watches

Published on January 7, 2015, the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Michel Houellebecq's Submission imagines a near-future France in which a Muslim Brotherhood candidate wins the presidency in 2022 with the support of the Socialist Party. The protagonist, Francois, is a middle-aged literature professor at the Sorbonne who specializes in J.-K. Huysmans, the nineteenth-century decadent novelist who converted to Catholicism. Francois is not a political man. He is tired, sexually spent, drinking too much, and disconnected from his own civilization. When the new regime offers him a generous salary, a young wife, and a return to patriarchal order, he finds he has no serious objection.

Satire, Not Prophecy

The novel is frequently misread as Islamophobic polemic or political prediction. It is neither. Houellebecq's target is not Islam but the exhaustion of the secular liberal West, a civilization so depleted of meaning, purpose, and fertility that it cannot summon a reason to resist anything. Francois does not convert out of conviction. He converts because the offer is better than what he has, and because he has nothing left to defend. The comedy is dark and precise: Houellebecq writes academic politics, sexual failure, and institutional cowardice with the same flat, clinical eye.

Houellebecq's Place

Among living novelists, Houellebecq is the most consistent anatomist of Western civilizational decline. Submission is his most politically direct novel, but the themes of male isolation, spiritual emptiness, and the failure of liberal individualism to provide meaning run through all his major works. This is the book that earned him simultaneous condemnation from the French left and the French right, which is usually a sign that something true has been said.