Critical Praise

“Houellebecq is not merely a satirist but --- more unusually --- a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind.”

—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

“Strange and surprising…[SUBMISSION] is a classic novel of European cultural pessimism that belongs in whatever category we put books like Thomas Mann’s THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN and Robert Musil’s THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES.”

—Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books

“SUBMISSION is a fine, deeply literary work…. No recent English-language novel compares.”

—David Sexton, The Spectator

“Michel Houellebecq shares with Aldous Huxley a fascination with religious phenomena, and with George Orwell a horror of political correctness and an acute sense --- which one rarely credits him for --- of common decency. Furthermore, and God knows that I love Huxley and Orwell, he is an even more powerful novelist.” 

—Emmanuel Carrère, Le Monde des Livres

“Is France’s most celebrated controversialist offering a splenetic vision of the Muslim threat to Europe or a spineless ‘submission’ to gradual Islamic takeover? Actually, neither. It’s much more interesting than that…. The real target of Houellebecq’s satire --- as in his previous novels --- is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man…. [A] darkly clever and funny book.”

—Steven Poole, The Guardian

“It would be easy to object to [SUBMISSION] based on hearsay alone, but Houellebecq is both too skillful as a novelist to be saying anything merely polemical, and far too intelligent to ignore.” 

—Gaby Wood, The Telegraph

“A melancholy tribute to the pleasure of surrender.”

—Adam Shatz, London Review of Books