Thursday 8 January 2015

Scarily Prescient: On Houellebecq's 'Submission' in December 2014

...So, Houellebecque’s forthcoming dystopia will deal with “a future France where a Muslim party wins the presidency”...According to the short description of the novel, the main character is a literature instructor at university specialising in the French fin-de-siècle writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. Well, interesting choice, as Huysmans not unlike Houellebecque had his fair share of provocation at the end of the 19th century with the publication of The Damned, a novel about Satanism rampaging in France with a shocking (for that time, of course) description of a black mess. I am not going to draw any hasty conclusions before Houellebecque’s novel is published, but I do hope that the inevitable scandal will not spiral into a Salman Rushdie or a Danish cartoon situation. Anyway, Huysman’s novel looks like a useful preliminary read for those waiting for the publication of Submission
Houellebecq was also on the cover of the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo

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