“Houellebecq’s name is so rich with associations —”
November 5, 2015 8:37 AM   Subscribe

Karl Ove Knausgaard reads Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission. [The New York Times]
“First of all I wondered how this must feel for him, to be made a symbol of baseness and evil at a time of such crisis, not only in France but all over the world, for Houellebecq is presumably just an ordinary guy who happens to spend his time writing novels as well as he can. What inhuman pressure he must be under, I thought to myself during those days. Or were his critics right in claiming that he was a cynical bastard seeking out the areas in which he knew he could cause most damage, in order to aggrandize his own name?”
Previously.
posted by Fizz (27 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Before I begin this review, I have to make a small confession. [500 WORDS LATER:]
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:49 AM on November 5, 2015 [9 favorites]


What a wretched review. It's 75% Knausgaard maundering about Knausgaard and 25% Knaussgaard maundering about things he clearly finds less interesting than himself.

Though it's completely useless for determining whether one might want to read Houellebecq, I feel confirmed in my decision to avoid My Struggle.
posted by zenoli at 9:17 AM on November 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


For me, Knausgaard falls into one of those categories where I have read more about him than from him. Along with: David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka. These types of shorter reviews, profiles, & essays are always enjoyable to me.
posted by Fizz at 9:33 AM on November 5, 2015


After reading this book, I took down My Struggle from the bookshelf where it has been resting comfortably since the summer. I flipped through a few pages, then put it back to go outside and rake some leaves.
posted by fraxil at 9:36 AM on November 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Basically I just assume the guy is HP Lovecraft but with more racism and moaning about people not liking gabled windows enough and less cool monsters and bleak cosmic vistas.
posted by Artw at 9:43 AM on November 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


How is he on cats or ice cream?
posted by Artw at 9:44 AM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


How is he on cats or ice cream?

Taken from the Paris Review: Completely Without Dignity: An Interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard
Interviewer: What about writers more generally? Do you agree with Faulkner, who told this magazine that “‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies”?

Knausgaard: A great Norwegian poet, Georg Johannesen, one of the leading intellectuals in the sixties and seventies, got a similar question once. If the house is burning, and you can only save one thing, what will you take with you, the Rembrandt or the cat? He would have taken the cat. I would do that too. Literature is about people, not books, as paintings are about people, not canvases or colors.
posted by Fizz at 9:50 AM on November 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Have there been any serious Muslim or Islamic reviews of the work? I'd be interested in that perspective since all we seem to hear from the literary class is about the book or the author's racism, immigration views, religious views, etc.

Since "submission" is in fact part of the eventual narrative, I just keep wondering what Muslims--preferably a European resident-Muslim--think about the work. Have searched around and can't sift through the copy-and-paste reviews everyone seems to have done. The supposedly-offended group's reaction to the work would be important to me.

Anyone?
posted by resurrexit at 10:02 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Adam Shatz's review was more interesting but I am not entirely convinced by his paradoxical conclusion. Yes, Houellebecq claims fundamentalist and sexist conservatism would still be better than nihilism (or modern liberalism) but that does not seem to be an endorsement.
posted by Phersu at 10:12 AM on November 5, 2015


Have there been any serious Muslim or Islamic reviews of the work?

I found this review written by Benjamin Haddad: The Unbearable Lightness of Freedom. Haddad is a research fellow at Hudson Institute specializing in European and transatlantic affairs. Though I have been unable to find out if he is Islamic or not. Still worth a read.
Submission therefore is a success—despite its many flaws—because it really does tell us something about the times we live in. As the English translation hits American bookshelves this week, Europe is grappling with self-doubt and is flirting with toxic populism and cynical resignation. Even with its shortcomings, the novel brilliantly manages to distill the intellectual questioning wracking the continent. Can European societies recover? Can Europe give a new sense of purpose, identity and bond to its citizens, while still keeping with its liberal tradition? Or will Europeans turn to more totalitarian ideologies, and to populist demagogues, as they forsake the lonely, thankless and exhausting individualist project demanded by modern liberalism?
posted by Fizz at 10:26 AM on November 5, 2015


FWIW, Hudson is pretty conservative.
posted by OmieWise at 10:45 AM on November 5, 2015


And Haddad is Jewish, for goodness' sake. It's like a festival of poor reading comprehension in here.
posted by RogerB at 10:50 AM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


RogerB, I couldn't find a lot of information on Haddad. Apologies. I also just wanted to share the article, whether he was Islamic or not.
posted by Fizz at 11:04 AM on November 5, 2015


Since "submission" is in fact part of the eventual narrative, I just keep wondering what Muslims--preferably a European resident-Muslim--think about the work. Have searched around and can't sift through the copy-and-paste reviews everyone seems to have done. The supposedly-offended group's reaction to the work would be important to me.

Anyone?


I have a lot of French Muslim friends. Their universal consensus – and these are all people with differing views of Islam – is that it's a torchon unfit to be used in the toilet, and they really fucking wish more people would talk to them about what it is to be Muslim in France.
posted by fraula at 11:11 AM on November 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


fraula, psst...tell them about MetaFilter...psst...tell them to join and post and comment.
posted by Fizz at 11:24 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's 75% Knausgaard maundering about Knausgaard

By my word processor's count this review is 4,522 words. Counting every paragraph in which anything personal is discussed as 100% "maundering about Knausgaard," 1,292 of those words are maundering about Knausgaard. Following the discussion of Huysmans, the final 2,573 words are an uninterrupted discussion of the Houellebecq novel.
posted by RogerB at 11:28 AM on November 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


I have a lot of French Muslim friends. Their universal consensus – and these are all people with differing views of Islam – is that it's a torchon unfit to be used in the toilet, and they really fucking wish more people would talk to them about what it is to be Muslim in France.

The strange thing here is the implication that one's faith or culture is an impassible wall between a reader and satire. It's a silly comparison, but my first concern when assessing the Colbert Report was not to rush out an poll my hyperconservative family.

Soumission is an interesting read. It'll be remembered, if it's remembered, as very much a product of its era. It makes no attempts to define a new one.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 11:31 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's 75% Knausgaard maundering about Knausgaard and 25% Knaussgaard maundering about things he clearly finds less interesting than himself.

I'm sure that writing the review will be an exciting chapter in My Struggle, pt 10.
posted by betweenthebars at 12:26 PM on November 5, 2015


Oh jeez betweenthebars, I WISH there weren't only 2 parts left.
posted by wyndham at 12:42 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Though it's completely useless for determining whether one might want to read Houellebecq, I feel confirmed in my decision to avoid My Struggle.

Since My Struggle is not represented as anything other than what you describe, and indeed is often praised just for those qualities, I'm not sure why reading an article by Knausgaard would make you confirmed in a decision to avoid something that's never been represented as anything other than what it already is.
posted by blucevalo at 1:47 PM on November 5, 2015


This celebrated memoirist sure talks about himself a lot
posted by RogerB at 2:01 PM on November 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


I haven't gotten around to reading the book (haven't read anything by Houellebecq aside from his Lovecraft book), I've been struck by the way in which the work seems, going by reviews, to be more clearly afraid of and disturbed by women rather than Muslims. A big selling point of Islam seems to be it's "rectification" of gender relations via the re-subordination of women, making sure every man has access to sex whenever he wants. It comes up in virtually every review I've read (including this one, in the confrontation with Myriam), and yet always in a "oh, yeah, and this" way, after which it's right back to the glaring question of Houellebecq's views on Islam. It's kind of weird and puzzling.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:47 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Houellebecq & Knausgaard are two guys who are just not trying to win any popularity contests here.

Knausgaard says some interesting things about the nature of faith in his review.
posted by ovvl at 4:54 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


This is the first of Houllebecq's books that I've been tempted to read, but this review (which I read this morning) is ridiculously self-indulgent. Like the recent FPP about Miranda July's interview with Rihanna, this is a style that seems to becoming more common but is not particularly to my taste.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:55 PM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


Like the recent FPP about Miranda July's interview with Rihanna, this is a style that seems to becoming more common but is not particularly to my taste.

And this style could very much be related to the fact that both are articles featured from The New York Times. Every news/media company has a particular editorial direction or idea that they are trying to place themselves in and it just so happens that this is what the NYT wants to do.
posted by Fizz at 6:34 AM on November 6, 2015


Submission is strongly satirical: This, really. Submission is highly satirical, frankly hilarious (depressingly so) and a somehow lighter read than some of Houellebecq's previous works. A large part of Houellebecq's talent comes from deriving humour from the bleakest situations (e.g. trying to buy a single bed, fixing the plumbing, depression, terrorism, worldwide apocalypse, that sort of things) and Submission delivers in spades.

It should made clear that the book is not about the real Islam, no more than Possibility of an island was about the (real) Raelian cult or Platform was about the (real) Accor hotel group: in Submission's Islam, Muslims drink massive amounts of alcohol, which puzzles the Houellebecq stand-in character for a few seconds until he confesses that "Islam is a religion he doesn't know well". Now people can criticize the book for using fantasy Islam as an unnecessary othering prop. As we know, there's no lack of people - from Western xenophobes to radical islamists - using fantasy Islam for their personal and nasty political agendas. So perhaps Houellebecq should have stuck to his original plan (the first draft was about Catholicism) or he could have used extra-terrestrials rather than bogus Muslims to make his point (though people would have pointed out that his ETs were actually standing in for Muslims, just like ETs were standing in for Communists in Cold War era movies). But as it is, it makes for a very good yarn, that actually subverts the usual Eric Zemmour/Renaud Camus/Bat Ye'or islamophobic end-of-the-civilisation narrative by presenting the Muslim president Ben Abbes as a true democrat, a real French patriot, a new De Gaulle who actually saves France from apathy and makes it great again (of course that's the in-story dominant opinion reported by the in-story media). At one point, Ben Abbes humiliates a Saudi ambassador in order to preserve France's independance, just like De Gaulle did with the USA in the 1960s. The submission of the title is not the one imposed by Islam, but the one willingly embraced by the French people in the book, and notably by its intellectuals, Kent Brockman-style (I, for one...). One of the main (and most repellent) protagonist of the book even lives in the (real) hôtel particulier where Anne Cécile Desclos/Dominique Aury/Pauline Réage wrote her BDSM classic Story of O, this ur-tale of voluntary submission.

One central topic of the book is indeed the actual relevance of having "national" values (and the French love to boast of their values as much as Americans love to boast of their freedoms) when these values tend to collapse for whatever reason. The situation of the Houellebecq stand-in character's Jewish girlfriend Myriam, who is forced to emigrate to Israel (the Houellebecq stand-in character "does not know history well, having been an inattentive student in school" and thus doesn't get why the situation is potentially dangerous to Jews), is a stark reminder of the 1940s, when the same progressive France who had previously brought to power the Popular Front led by Leon Blum, an atheist Jew, went along with the antisemitic and socially regressive policies of the collaborationist Vichy. And like the Ben Abbes governement in Submission, the Vichy governement rolled back decades of progress in gender equality by promulgating laws meant to take women out of the workforce and back to the kitchen. In the novel, in a scarily understated fashion, the near-disappearance of women from the public space goes uncriticized by the narrator. When invited to a party at the (real) Arab World Institute, he only notices the absence of women after 45 minutes, and that's only to deplore how the party is dull because of that. Worse: the men cannot discuss football either, the horror! When visiting the house of a former female colleague who was forced to quit her high-ranking teaching job, he describes in loving details her wonderful cooking. The French intellectuals portrayed in the book (with the exception of the female professor) are pontifiying idiots acting primarily in their self-interest, namely sex, money, honours and career. The worst of them, the collaborationist Rediger (a pun on the real Robert Redeker, a philosophy professor who had to go into hiding after publishing islamophobic views), seems to adopt the Islamic faith for intellectual reasons, but boasts of his 15-year old bride (while keeping a fully stocked cabinet of fine wines and spirits). The Houellebecq-character's final conversion to Islam is partly the result of witnessing an older male colleague, a 60-year old virgin of disputable hygiene, marry a much younger student using a matchmaking service.

I understand that for many casual readers (and for most people who, rather than reading the book, rely on other people's opinions) there's a lot of confusion between Houellebecq-the-author and the numerous Houellebecq stand-ins who inhabit his novels, as all of them indeed look a lot like each other and share a many recurring personal issues and preoccupations. It doesn't help that Houellebecq-the-author tends to stay in character during interviews (and movies) and occasionally say stupid stuff. In that respect, Houellebecq is not unlike Robert Crumb, who also puts rather extreme, fantasied and often despicable versions of himself in his works so it's up to the reader to sort the whole mess. The Houellebecq-characters actually do a lot of horrible stuff in the books, such as trying to make an underling commit murder (Whatever), randomly shooting "inferior" humans (Possibility of an island), setting up sex tourist resorts for the Accor hotel group (Platform)... The Houellebecq-character in Submission is an apathetic creep whose main obsession is his rapidly declining libido, barely kept alive by porn browsing (Houellebecq's description of YouPorn is a masterpiece, really, porn won't look the same after that). After discovering a gruesome murder scene in an abandoned gas station, he just steps over the cashier's body ("reluctlantly" though), and in a typically obsessive Houellebecq fashion, picks up "after a slight hesitation, a tuna-salad sandwich, a alcohol-free beer and a Michelin guide". So much for the apocalypse. So it is perhaps better to take whatever those Houellebecq-characters say with a big dollop of salt. They're totally unreliable narrators.
posted by elgilito at 2:55 PM on November 7, 2015 [3 favorites]




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