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.
*Evening Standard*
One cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature
without reading his work.
*New York Times*
One cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature
without reading his work.
*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.
*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 Céline 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 drôlerie; 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
François’ 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.
*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.
*Le Monde*
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