Michel Houellebecq’s new novel is called “Destroy”, but the title is deceptive: the book is a masterful ode to the family, to France, even to marriage.
from
Nils Minkmar
On the cover of the 2014 annual edition of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo a caricature of the writer Michel Houellebecq was depicted. He was mocked as a fortune-telling old thumb with a headscarf and crystal ball, who announces to the audience what the new year may bring: “In 2015 I will lose my teeth,” reads the line. Appeared a few days later Houellebecq’s novel “Submission”. In it he describes the advance of political Islam and the political and existential exhaustion of the academically educated middle class. And he describes how masked men roam Paris and empty the magazines of their machine guns.