VDare - Paul Gottfried on Houellebecq’s SOUMISSION: Would Nietzche Say Islam Can Redeem Europe? - "Houellebecq at least shows us that you cannot defeat a faith with a nullity."

Houellebecq’s SOUMISSION: Would Nietzche Say Islam Can Redeem Europe?

Michel Houellebecq (pronounced “Welbeck”)

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, the popular French novelist Michel Houellebecq is in the headlines because his latest book Soumission is being interpreted as an attack on Islam. But the truth is far more subversive and this acclaimed French writer has something far deeper to tell us about the emptiness at the heart of the modern West.

I’ve eagerly devoured all of Houellebecq’s books since Particules élémentaires (1997), which I discovered and devoured during a bumpy flight whose discomforts I barely noticed. Houellebecq (the pen name of Michel Thomas) provided a book with a fluid French style, ingeniously contrived erotic scenes (Houellebecq may be the greatest writer of elegant pornography since John Updike) and a plot seemingly designed to annoy the Left.

The book (translated into English as Atomized) tells us about the life of famous biologist Michel Djersinski, who mysteriously disappears in the twenty-first century after having plotted the path to a new level of human consciousness. Djersinski’s world is almost a parodyof the post-bourgeois, post-Christian society the contemporary West is turning into. Family life and personal relations have dissolved beyond anything that was imaginable before the second half of the twentieth century.

The most controversial aspect of the novel may be its contemptuous treatment of the radical student movement of the 1960s. ...

http://www.vdare.com/articles/houellebecqs-soumission-would-nietzche-say-islam-can-redeem-europe