SUBMISSION - MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ

This is one of the funniest, most ridiculous books I’ve ever read. Some background: I’ve never read any Houellebecq, I’m not really up on modern French shit, or European fiction generally (it’s a dead continent) but I’m certainly aware of his towering reputation. He’s, apparently, a serious intellectual who has his thumb on the heartbeat of a confused and nihilistic France. This book is supposed to be satire, or possibly a 1984 style warning, but I’m not sure he’s fully sure who the target of that satire is. Actually, 1984 is the wrong pull, this book is a rewritten HANDMAIDEN’S TALE, but with Islam and written from the male prespective. The plot is simple, it follows a University literature professor, who specializes in J.K. Huysmans, during 2022 when a member of the Muslim Brotherhood wins election, becomes president and begins Islamizing France. Given Houellebecq’s personal disdain for Islam, which he’s called the stupidest of all religions, one assumes that he’s trying to show us how much danger Europe is in, and how spineless intellectuals are (he goes out of his way in an afterwards to insists he’s never attended nor taught at a university). What actually ends up happening is an absurd phantasmagoria of French misogyny and islamophobia. As if to play into the stereotype that all French people are Pepe le Pew, the main focus is on sex. The narrator is a sad middle age man (tellingly, the same age as Houllebecq and Huysman when he found god) who picks a different student each year to fuck. He also fucks prostitutes and fantasizes about fucking constantly. These men are cucked by the powerful Arab Muslims who not only fuck more, they’re in a more confident, rich, rooted in tradition and get more pussy. When the narrator is considering what to do with this new world, and whether he wants to convert, he’s swayed when he goes to a rich Muslim’s house who has a 40 year old wife to cook for him and a 15 year old wife he was assigned. Likewise, he sees his dweeb coworkers get assigned a nubile young co-ed to be his wife and decides that maybe this Islam thing isn’t too bad after all. To keep the French parody theme going, the narrator also attempts to become a Catholic monk but quits because he loves smoking too much. I suppose this is supposed to be a critique of how Western Sexual mores, and general values, are unsatisfying and alienating and how reactionaries could easily marshal this feeling to gain support, but the novel itself undercuts this theory by completely removing women from the text. There’s basically one non-prostitute female character in the book, a Jewish woman who moves to Israel after the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, but even she frames her decision as stemming from her concerns around how Jews will be treated, not how women will be. In this version, the women of France are simply fired and removed from the workforce as asked to convert and assigned older, richer husbands and put up no resistance. They fall in line and it’s up to the French men to think about what this all means and which system is better. Would you rather live in a neoliberal sexual marketplace where everyone is pursuing an empty pleasure or would you prefer to return to a strict, Abrahamic patriarchy? The president himself seems to want to recreate the Roman Empire, but Muslim this time (he should look into what groups like ISIS think of Rome, what space Rome occupies in the Islamic psyche) and we’re left feeling like the West is hollow, vain and doomed to fail from this Oriental menace. It’s actually a bit more pointed than that, basically, while France offers sexual license to men it doesn’t really offer a sense of purpose, which Islam does through it’s ancient, strict patriarchy. And since this is , at heart, really what Frenchmen want, the nation is doomed. The book read to me like the crazed, paranoid ramblings of a Western Intellectual who’s life is vapid and stupid and who, frankly, I was rooting for to get conquered. Maybe I would get more out of this if I knew more about French politics (the beginning of the novel has a lot to do with which parties align with one another and create the conditions for Muslim control) or Huysman (who also comes up a lot, with references to his life sprinkled throughout) but this book came off as silly in the extreme. I like the idea that our fuck-game, in the West, is so sad and devoid of value (because we are not sufficiently subjecting women) that he more virile and strong Muslim invader will conquer us. Inshallah this comes to pass soon. 2022 Islamic caliphates.