Michael Houellebecq's Submission

I'm a sick man...a mean man. There's nothing attractive about me. I think there's something wrong with my liver.... I'm forty now.
--Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864)

Generally speaking my body was the seat of various bodily afflictions --headaches, rashes, toothaches, hemorrhoids -- that followed one after another, without interruption and almost never left me in peace -- and I was only forty-four!
---Michael Houellebecq, Submission (2015)

Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his review in The New York Times Book Review, said about Houellebecq that one "cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature without reading his work."  Even if this is true I would ask why one needs to keep abreast of literature anymore than movies, art or music.  Submission is a truly nasty work, both misogynistic and misanthropic, with an academic and satirical veneer.  The first person narrator is Francois, whose only "friend" is J.K. Huysman, the nineteenth century "decadent" author.  It is 2022 in France and the Muslims have taken over the coalition government.  Francois tries to find an intellectual way out, his search echoing Huysman's, who ended up as a Roman Catholic.  Francois ends up converting to the Muslim faith in order to get his teaching job back at the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne and to be able to have three young wives to cook for him and service him sexually (like Huysman he frequented brothels and never had a lasting relationship with a woman)

The liberal idea is dead in the Europe of 2022 and Europe is returning to empire (the Ottoman and Roman empires are mentioned) and patriarchy.  Jobs for women are abolished and education stops at the age of twelve, after which it is trade school.  As is often the case in contemporary novels it is difficult to determine to what extent Houellebecq shares the views of his narrator, but there is a rather sympathetic character, Robert Rediger, who settled on Islam as the only "way out of atheist humanism," agreeing with Toynbee that Christianity cannot be revived and the West has committed suicide.  Rediger believes that "the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission" (and yes, The Story of O is brought in as an analogy).