I honestly liked Submission, because of how open Houellebecq was about his ambiguous love-hate relationship with both France and Islam. You could see him playing idly with various right-wing ideas, finding all of them slightly distasteful, and being kind of unsure where he wanted things to go and what the point of all of it was. Even though it was undeveloped compared to his 1990s novels, the protagonist's lack of commitment of every social movement available to him seemed so specifically post-68 French compared to e.g. Hawthorne's suspicion of Puritan society, and Submission compared well with Douglas Murray's "The Strange Death of Europe," which said so much less and pretended to say so much more. Sounds like his meandering has become much duller in his latest book, though.
I honestly liked Submission, because of how open Houellebecq was about his ambiguous love-hate relationship with both France and Islam. You could see him playing idly with various right-wing ideas, finding all of them slightly distasteful, and being kind of unsure where he wanted things to go and what the point of all of it was. Even though it was undeveloped compared to his 1990s novels, the protagonist's lack of commitment of every social movement available to him seemed so specifically post-68 French compared to e.g. Hawthorne's suspicion of Puritan society, and Submission compared well with Douglas Murray's "The Strange Death of Europe," which said so much less and pretended to say so much more. Sounds like his meandering has become much duller in his latest book, though.