A novel by Prix Goncourt winner Michel Houellebecq about France in which a Muslim has become president. This is not a social novel, although it has a political picture of the day. It is about the fact that Sybarite indifference has a limit, and if we do not need our life, then someone else will claim our freedom.
A person of a different faith, a drug dealer or a despot husband — anyone. The protagonist of the novel, Francois, a teacher at the Sorbonne, is a lonely, lost intellectual, whom alcohol and sex help like anesthesia, but do not solve the problem of a total lack of meaning. “Submission” is not a novel about how sorry it is that everything turned out this way, but about the fact that he himself is to blame. Loss of values, infantilism, inability to independently choose anything, spiritual emptiness — the path that inevitably leads to the thought that «the highest happiness lies in complete humility.» Welbeck’s prose is devoid of artistic beauty, it contains only anatomically terrible truth. And a lonely call to take responsibility. For consolation — to other authors.
Translated from French by Maria Zonina. Corpus, 352 p.