Submission is the highly-anticipated new novel from the internationally bestselling French writer Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq is a poet, essayist and novelist. He is the author of several novels including The Map and the Territory (winner of the Prix Goncourt), Atomised, Platform, Whatever and Submission. He was awarded the Legion d'Honneur in 2019.
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 *
One cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature
without reading his work. -- Karl Ove Knausgaard * New York Times
*
One cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature
without reading his work. -- Karl Ove Knausgaard * New York Times
*
The narration is enjoyably sardonic, a pungent mixture of deadpan
jokes about sexual politics and close reading...Darkly clever and
funny. * Guardian *
A fine, deeply literary work...It is genuinely more admiring than
critical of Islam...It's electrifying; no recent English-language
novel compares. * Spectator *
Houellebecq's placid dystopias have been among the only
contemporary novels worth dropping things for - and this is
arguably the best of the lot...a bleakly funny satire on
submission and salvation...I can't think of another
contemporary writer who bares their soul so fearlessly - or with
such rewards. * Evening Standard *
Witty and deft...The polemical power of his
imagination...approaches that of two 20th-century masterpieces,
Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World...This is an
important novel...It's worth remembering that Houellebecq has
form in demonstrating that life sometimes imitates art. * Financial
Times *
Houellebecq's latest, Submission, brings his project to its most
accessible realization yet. What's the project? Jerking your chain
at the highest possible level, which a lot of people can sense from
the vibe around Houellebecq, and therefore pre-emptively avoid. You
shouldn't. The free and wild play of his hatred for modernity
and its usual self-flattering reassurances is a tonic to be
relished. Houellebecq's respect for his avowed models -
Lovecraft, and here, Huysmans, reveals a sturdy commitment to older
narrative forms, even genres - he's a horror writer, here updating
the 'Deal-with-the-devil' tale. Lorin Stein's relaxed translation
catches how Houellebecq's insouciant revulsion for propriety, and
his congenital self-loathing, trickles down into a vernacular full
of tiny slippages in and out of bourgeois formality, somewhat akin
to Inspector Clouseau trying to recapture his authoritativeness
after a pratfall. In the past these have read as errors of tone,
but in Submission, they're as funny as I think Houellebecq intends.
-- Jonathan Lethem
No question about the book of the year: it's Michel
Houellebecq's Submission in Lorin Stein's fluent
translation...Following its publication, the Guardian asked
brightly: 'Does Houellebecq really hate women and Muslims, or is he
just a twisted provocateur?' But the book is more nuanced and more
troubling than that. The narrator doesn't register women who aren't
young and shaggable - tell me that's not how men see women - and in
this story, it's libidinous intellectuals who succumb to the new
order because it suits them. Plausible? Sort of. Worrying? Yep.
Important? Very. -- Melanie McDonagh * Spectator, Books of the Year
*
Submission is both a more subtle and less immediately scandalous
satire than the brouhaha surrounding it might suggest...All
described with lashings of Houellebecq's characteristically
phosphorescent bile...That we feel Houellebecq's satire (like all
the best from Swift to Celine to Waugh) is only half in jest makes
reading Submission a shifty, discomfiting affair: we're never sure
quite how many steps ahead of us the author is; how much of the
nastiness is meant and how much mere drolerie; how many levels lie
beneath, just waiting to suck us down from our moral high ground. *
Observer *
It is a fascinating and disturbing vision of a society which
becomes an accidental theocracy... A rather brilliant conceit,
worthy of George Orwell...Submission is a fascinating and
original dystopia - challenging and ambiguous. It is a
vision of what could happen if the West finally abandoned liberal
enlightenment values and fell into the arms of religion. * Herald
*
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. * London Review of
Books *
There are echoes of Albert Camus's outsider, Meursault, in
Francois' lack of emotion and relentless cynicism...Submission,
expertly translated by Lorin Stein, can be read on a number of
levels. As much as it is about Islamic and political tensions in
France, Houellebecq also explores the inner world of his
chauvinistic antihero who struggles to find meaning in his life and
seeks solace in sex. * Independent on Sunday *
Michel Houllebecq's Submission is many things: comic, profound,
and at times unexpectedly moving. It is much more about human
nature than Islam, and to think otherwise is to misunderstand it.
Of the several suicide notes for the west Houellebecq has written,
this is his best. -- Richard Flanagan * Observer *
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 him. -- Emmanuel Carrere *
Le Monde *
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