Submission
ABOUT
THE BOOK
As the 2022 French Presidential election looms, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and the charismatic Muhammed Ben Abbes of the growing Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the political left to block the Front National’s alarming ascendancy, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. This proves to be the death knell of French secularism, as Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for our narrator François – misanthropic, middle-aged and alienated – life is set on a new course.
Submission is a devastating satire, comic and melancholy by turns, and a profound meditation on faith and meaning in Western society.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Lorin
Stein
Lorin Stein joined The Paris Review as its third editor in 2010. During his tenure, the Review has received two National Magazine Awards, as well as Webby honors, Pushcart Prizes, and O’Henry Awards. Stein’s criticism and translations have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, n+1, and Harper’s. He is an editor-at-large at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in New York City.
Lorin Stein joined The Paris Review as its third editor in 2010. During his tenure, the Review has received two National Magazine Awards, as well as Webby honors, Pushcart Prizes, and O’Henry Awards. Stein’s criticism and translations have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, n+1, and Harper’s. He is an editor-at-large at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in New York City.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Francois is a typical Houellebecqian male: isolated, cerebral and sometimes loathsome. But the book has aroused controversy not for this disagreeable lout but for the quasi-dystopian future Houellebecq has furnished around him. As a sincere satirist, the author is genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind. Submission is a controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny novel from France’s most famous living literary figure.
Not a book to enjoy, but one which fascinates and disturbs in its dystopian view of near-future French academia and politics gone wrong.
This unsettling dystopian novel evokes the islamistic near-future of France in an intelligent, controversial and subtly satirical manner. The topical subject matter is rendered in a highly readable, clear and logical prose which is at times musical or poetic, at times sexually explicit.