Submission
This book was a pain to get through. But something I’m learning is that you don’t have to understand every word to grasp a book. In the beginning, I let myself get bogged down by Huysmans and Rimbaud and Balzac.
I still don’t know if I understand this book, but I thought it was an interesting commentary on the crisis of humanism and liberal individualism, and more broadly, the decline of the west. I thought Houellebecq made an interesting observation when he wrote, “On every question that mattered, the nativists and the Muslims were in perfect agreement.”
Connor from Goodreads writes:
Throughout the book we are confronted with this idea that Europe post rejection of Christianity is in suicidal decline, and rather than sundering it further as many on the right warn, the influx of immigrants from Muslim countries is the only thing that can rejuvenate France. The patriarchal, pro-masculine, pro-polygamy nature of Saudi Islam is the only thing that can rouse the West from its decadence, personified in the alcoholic, wayward Lothario narrator.
I have a lot of questions. What exactly is Houellebecq satirizing? Is there going to be a Ben Abbes in our world? Why all the lurid details in a book purportedly about Islam? What does the prevalence of laïcité or what François calls atheist humanism (there’s a good quote on the bottom of pg. 204) mean for our world?