What did you think of this book? I just finished it and want to talk about it...

What did you think of this book? I just finished it and want to talk about it. What message did you take away from the ending? Everyone said it was an anti Muslim book but by the end I wasn't too sure about that.

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I haven't read it, but could you tell me if its as pornographic as his earlier stuff? I got halfway through "Elementary Particles" and couldn't stand it. It bugs me, he can be really insightful when he's on point but I don't want to pollute my mind with "and then she tongued his cock while fondling his hairy balls blah blah blah"

There were probably 5 pages total of explicit sexual stuff.

It's not really anti-muslim, Houellebecq was so lucky that the terrorist attacks happened when this was published, lots of publicity for free.

It's more like a 'waiting for the barbarians' situation - in this particular book, Saudi Arabia taking over everything leads to a renewal of a (to the narrator/possibly Houellebecq) stale France. It's overdrawn to shit and misses all nuance and Houellebecq can't write 20 pages without falling back into his weird old man Rusty bullshit ('finally I can marry a 15 year old girl who's obedient to me'). Overall 2.5 out of 5 I reckon

I haven't read it (plan on it though) but I have seen a large amount of Veeky Forums posters say that instead of being very anti-Islam the book instead just suggests that its not very compatible with western culture and that its a mistake for liberals/feminists/etc to shill for Islam and to want more muslim immigrants because Islam is inherently retrograde and reactionary and having a large percentage of the pop. be muslim immigrants will just cause liberal values to recede and there will be way less support for democracy, tolerance, art, secularism, free speech, women's rights, human rights that conflict with Islam etc

I was expecting him to show the negative backlash that would take place from western countries embracing Islam, but he ended up making a good case for why the West could/should be taken over. Seems like by the end, France was in a better place than before.

I also have to agree that Christianity is a feminine religion.

I should add, while that perspective may seem anti-Islam to some, many people who have read it said that the book just points that out without much judging. Also, polls of western muslims generally indicate that that's true.

That's definitely the message I took from it too, and that's also why I find it so interesting. It's paradoxical: Westerners who support Muslim's are liberals who would oppose many Muslim values (patriarchy, for one), but the conservative Westerners who don't support Muslim's share many similar beliefs.
Almost like it might not be the worst thing to embrace it.

The book isn't even about Islam in it's entirety, it's much more about the ennui of the liberal male in a secular and valueless society.

>it's much more about the ennui of the liberal male in a secular and valueless society.

Yea and the reason the ending was so surprising to me was because he never touched on how to restore the flame of potential without embracing Islam.

wtf im muslim now

Maybe that's the point? Maybe he's a pessimist and is convinced western society as we know it is over.
lmao

Yes, I think his conversion wasn't as sincere as Huysmans - or maybe he was implying Huysmans' wasn't either, since he talks about how he retained his bourgeois creature comforts after his conversion. For the main character there is a strong self-serving element, but that doesn't make his conversion any less real? Not sure how to say it.

Christianity is a cuck religion. Joseph was literally raising his wife's son and Jesus was a virgin who told us to turn to other buttcheek.
Muhammad (pbuh) on the other hand was a true alpha, with 11 wives (including a Loli and a hot milf)

>Jesus was a virgin
conjecture

I sincerely agree with this but I still hate Muslims for being smelly, brown, no fun allowed shitheads.

Jesus never married nor was it his vocation unless you're some kind of filthy gnostic. Imagine how much more complicated the religion would be if we had to venerate the "wife of Christ" too.

Islam is a disgrace for simple reasons. Forbids alcohol, forbids porks, forbids drawing humans and animals (only their austictic geometric abstract art is acceptable), thinks lowly of music, sometimes forbidding it, and thinks lowly of dogs.

it is an anti-art anti-pleasure religion.
It is more like Judaism than like Christianity. An unambiguously monotheistic semitic desert religion.

Reminder that Paul was an insane asexual and he was basically dictating orthodoxy.

>Yuppie life is bankrupt
>French society is bankrupt
>Huysmans conversion is no longer possible because the church is fucked
>Academics are huge assholes that are not able to perceive what is happening in the world around them
>Capitalism is a stain, but replacing it as a system with something like distributism brings about the same result
>Islam is the last faith available for the morally bankrupt westerner
>Unfortunately humans are total assholes
>Protagonist really doesnt care about any of this shit, but he likes young pussy, and is willing to do anything to fuck teenagers
>He falsely (imo) follows huysman's path for totally cynical reasons, but is so in love with his object of study that even he doesnt realize it.
>Elites are elites and always will be. The left are a bunch of cucks that will bend over for ultra-traditionalism to fuck it in the ass if it is incompatible with their beliefs on racism
>The right are huge assholes who's fight for tradition dooms the west because they are so unpalatable to regular humans
>I have nothing to mourn because two 15 year olds to fuck

Legit funny book, and uncomfortably on the mark.

Retrograde Muslims and Christians also whine about how they are persecuted by each other. It's not so much a revival of religion than post-modern leeching. Their insistence on fighting so-called degeneracy instead of building utopia also leads to think they are porn addicts unlike last century's activists.

classical and new liberals have created a Christianity without god, which means just hedonism disguised as progress and ''educating the pleb so that the pleb be free, free as in ''do what you want, entertain yourself'' [without the means to have it, perhaps, but more importantly without being blamed for your actions]. The same people equally dream of making the humanity non-hedonistic. Hedonists are crushed by their hedonism and dream, more so when they are bored, only of making people better, which is precisely being not hedonistic.

after the fall of positivism and their contradictory/ retarded faith in the fantasy of the universality in the human rights plus the fucking abysmal lack of idea of what to do with their creation which is the middle class [beyond making these people work and enjoying themselves outside of work], these people are led to embrace various doctrines for salvation, but more importantly, the doctrine which would save them would still be a doctrine
-which is not Christianity, since liberals have taken powers from Christians [which bring liberals love to hate Christians]
-allows the care free attitude towards the world [''do what you want as long as you pay my taxes''] on a pragmatic level [like people still must be able to go on vacation every few months, to take picture of their shitty meals abroad, sleep around but still feel good for calling fuckers degenerate, listening to music, enjoying yourself watching products from the entertainment industry...]
-still hide enough the above hedonism so that people can feel better about being animals, by pretending to seek a higher power on a weekly basis

THese fuckers have failed to make the middle class something else than clients. these people have tried to make the pleb
-citizens, but it turns out that the fantasy of educating the pleb so that the pleb vote for more classical.new liberalism is super expensive once you have billions of fuckers to convert and even worse, the humanity being hedonistic in nature, people remain hedonistic no matter what
-employees, but employees are disposable by definition and this fantasy is lost
-clients, where people can be moral [=adhering to the human rights] when they buy stuff form amazon or ebay

these liberals have tried to seek salvation in building a society with the asian doctrines, but the asian doctrines are
-foreign the notion of society, like buddhism
-or they say >muh tradition, but the liberals despise the tradition differing form the ''republicanism''

so they are left with the fucking savage societies where ten people eat plants in the amazonia or the jews and the muslism and the sharia which is indeed the best fusion of
-a civil law like any liberal dream of, so that liberal can control their people
-the higher power so that it puts an end to relativism and explicit hedonism

the sharia is what chrisitanity has failed to produce, which means it is what the christians without god crave,

>without being blamed for your actions
aka, ''the right to have a second chance so that people are not able to remind you of your failures]

>these liberals have tried to seek salvation in building a society with the asian doctrines, but the asian doctrines are
>foreign the notion of society, like buddhism

If you meant to type "forgo" the notion of society then that's not true at all. In Buddhist countries the religious organizations and monastic orders have typically had significant influences on art, culture, politics and on the public consciousness.

The idea of Buddhism as a retreat from the world is a misconception which stems from Buddhists in the west being 2% or 3% of the population. In Myanmar for example the Buddhist orders are involved in politics and are a nationalist and conservative influence.

I'm from /pol/ so keep this in mind. I started reading it but then I got suspicious and flipped to the ending.

I took it to be that he just gave up. Like in 1984 he just gives up and embraces the new reality. It sickened me and weak-willed faggots like him should be first in line on the day of the rope.

>on the day of the rope

>the sharia is what chrisitanity has failed to produce, which means it is what the christians without god crave,

This is a process which has been ongoing since the 12th century. The common law system has been appropriating from Islamic sources (e.g. the action of debt (Aq’d), the assize of novel disseisin (Istihqaq), trial by jury (lafif), etc, etc...) but it's only natural for more primitive system to look to the more sophisticated ones as they develop

See the legal scholar John Makdisi's "The Islamic Origins of the Common Law":
scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3823&context=nclr

do you think main character = good guy?

That's some taqiyyah if I ever saw it.

common law =/= civil law

Please tell me how the shire courts of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia stole from Islam during the 800s.

I have a massive deja vu right now.

you could, huh, read the fucking study
also no matter the civ, law have many sources and it's not picky about them

It is a criticism of Islam, but also of french people (and all westerners by extension).

The lazy, selfish, passive protagonist willing to accept living in a muslim dictatorship wasn't named Francois for nothing: it means "french man". He represents all french men. Passive, myopic and lazy in the face of a demographical and cultural invasion.

>he doesn't fap on Houellebecq's pages
It's like you want to be a pleb.

You should read Platform my son.

Why is this stuff in print?

Good post. It also exposes the submissiveness of intellectuals to Islam instead of defending the secularism of the Enlightenment.

With some 240,000 copies sold in a mere three weeks, it completely overshadowed the 574 other new novels of France's fall literary season of 2001.


It got praised hard.

And he criticised Islam more directly back then.

>''Islam had shattered my life, and Islam was certainly something I could hate. In the days that followed, I dedicated myself to hating Islam.'"

>"Each time that I hear that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child, or a pregnant Palestinian woman has been shot in the Gaza Strip, I shiver with enthusiasm at the thought that there is one less Muslim.''

edgy af
does he still say stuff like this?

To me it seems like a ruse. It comes to spark fire in its readers about the ease in which the main character, an itnellectual who is suppose to be able to discern different ideas, accepts foreign cultural values.

In truth though i think Islam itself will soon die off as well, and go the same way christianity did if nothing changes.
The problem of christianity will be repeated in the quickly rising muslim second world.
With more education and the spread of information through the net Islam simply cannot win the ideological struggle as its common interpretations are literal and posit it against the natural sciences.
For religion to survive it has to be reshaped and rethought with the knowledge that we gained in the 20th century including cultural relativism.

The bible and its interpretations cannot be put opposite side of science.
The bible itself is an image of a society in which there was no sharp division between science history and fantasy like we do now.
It needs to be looked at and interpreted with this full realization in mind.
We have to look at its purpose back then and see how we can find the roles the bible played back then in contemporary societal structures and culture.
If we imagine anciant society as a ball, contemporary society is the same ball but with a lot of extra air, its surface stretched out and different parts of the ball much further away from each other than before.
Science and literature and politics were all part of the bible and did not exist as disciplines. The bible is important as a pathway to the workings of an infantile society that we can extrapolate to understand what part we might be missing or which one is under developed or over developed in contemporary society.

Religion must be understood as a cultural scietal phenomena, not a private matter, which is absolutely rediculeous.
Religating religious thinking to small seperate communities kills it off instead of circulating religious ideas in a strucutre that forces them to oppose each otehr and resolve conflicts of ideas to come up with the best interpretations and solution.

It's Houellebecq, so this is essentially an essay in fictionalized format. There is essentially no artistry to the writing, except what is necessary to provide a sense of a "documentary". Even autistic at times.

Ultimately it summons Islam to defend European civilization from itself. The lost westerners have to be dragged kicking and screaming, enticed not with intellectual achievement but with money and women. Houellebecq's Huysmans/the main character/Ho himself(?) champions domestic life over obscene hedonism. A bit counter-character from H, certainly...to what extent is this all irony?

"his submission is pragmatic, without flame, superficial, whereas Huysmans’s was impassioned, anguished, a matter of life and death."

Freancois also doesn't seem to realize how real Huysman's conversion was.

>Michel "Mausoleums for Muslims" Houellebecq

I think the main character is the average guy. Not remarkable in any way but somewhat weary. Most people are only concerned about their immediate lives, which is what he focuses on at the book ending, thinking that living and accepting this Islamified France could be a new life and bring benefits... if he just accepts it.

Good or bad, that's your decision. To me, he was just part of the rabble.

People have difficulty to split small tabs in a restaurant and yet they claim to be benevolent

It's not what he himself says, it's what the character in his book says.

Platforme is great.

buonmpo

you see the problem of the positivist, or even the rationalist in science,:
doubt is permitted only when the doubt is judged acceptable by the scientist [what is acceptable is what makes you have faith in what the scientist claims]:

-if you doubt too little from the statements of people talking to you, the scientist will call you a religious, a sheep, a guy spending his time on metaphysical theses which are disconnected form the reality [the reality that the scientist posits]
-if you doubt too much from the statements of the scientist, the scientist will wave then the card of nominalism, anti-realism, relativism/nihilism/solipsism and terrorize you, since the scientists have no other means, than terrorism, to validate their position

the fact that you have faith in mathematical models to tell you about ''the world'' (which is an inductive concept, like all concepts) is already a philosophical stance. but scientists cannot justify this stance and they become very upset as soon as they are recalled that they fail at justifying their claims that their inductions and deductions are more than conventions inside some formal language.
So they even say explicitly that they are not paid to justify their faith and that this justification does not matter anyway (because they choose to claim that ''science works, look it gives us computers and cars :DDDD'' which is nothing but feeding our hedonism and the statement itself remains very dubious)
religion is a coping mechanism once you face your failure of your life, just like other contrived fantasizes, your faith in the scientific method included.


Religions are meant to leave material-bodily hedonism, travels, concerts, foods, sex and so on, for a spiritual hedonism, through prayers for theists and mediation for atheists.
Plenty of material hedonist love to think of themselves as less hedonistic than they are, since it improves their hedonism in thinking that they are not animals...most people who claim to be religious are not all, it is just the way they are.

...

This guy sorta gets it.

The submission already happened. Houellebecq is saying the liberal, western man, is just as lazy and in self-denial than the Sunni Muslim migrant.

We don't see the protagonist change because of Islam. The real critique here is of Nietzsche. He's arguing against Nietzsche's belief that Islam says 'yes to life'. Houellebecq is saying Islam doesn't offer real change. We see none in the novel. The protagonist converts because he wants to fuck young girls.

Houellebecq is saying liberals and Muslims are both bums.

>Houellebecq is saying Islam doesn't offer real change
what? how can you say that when the book constantly highlights the changes happening all over France due to an increase in Muslim leadership?

i get that it doesn't change a person individually (necessarily) but there's clearly been a huge cultural shift that will certainly change people in future generations and society in general.

Houellebecq intentionally writes that way. Depressingly mediocre content mirrors depressingly mediocre style.

>"his submission is pragmatic, without flame, superficial, whereas Huysmans’s was impassioned, anguished, a matter of life and death."

Yes, 21st century man converts out of convenience, not out of aesthetics.

>when the book constantly highlights the changes happening all over France

And there are none. Women dresses more modestly. The Muslim leader name-drops distributism (originally Catholic). But that's it. And we especially see nothing different in the protagonist. Who is won over easily when he realizes he can have multiple wives and basically break whatever religious rules he wants (ie drink alcohol).

> but there's clearly been a huge cultural shift that will certainly change people in future generations and society in general.

No and Houellebecq is critiquing Rene Guenon here. He's showing that a 21st century Guenon would not look at Islam and see traditional system that will withstand modernity.

Houellebecq is not choosing Islam over Liberalism. Islam = Liberalism. They both completely submit to whatever happens.

Making women comply with sharia standards isn't a big shift?

If Islam = Liberalism than what would Conservatism look like?

Its the weakness of the Liberals and the distastefulness of the right that allow the triumph of Islam in the book.

The young girls are just the carrot used to elevate him. They're a means, not an end.

>The young girls are just the carrot used to elevate him
;^)

there are none of those though

>without falling back into his weird old man Rusty bullshit ('finally I can marry a 15 year old girl who's obedient to me').
This is the evolutionary goal of every male.

I think it's both a pro- and anti-Muslim book. He's clearly not a fan of Islam, yet at the same time he critiques the meaningless of life in the west following the dominance of atheism, and ironically suggests Islam is the cure for this meaningless. I think it's a challenge to modern society, arguing that if we are to live in a godless world then we will need to find something to fill the gap that leads to.

>In Buddhist countries the religious organizations and monastic orders have typically had significant influences on art, culture, politics and on the public consciousness.

>The idea of Buddhism as a retreat from the world is a misconception which stems from Buddhists in the west being 2% or 3% of the population. In Myanmar for example the Buddhist orders are involved in politics and are a nationalist and conservative influence.

same goes for korea before confucianism got more popular. the poster youre replying to is clearly oblivious.

>I didn't actually read the book
>I read a few pages then skipped to the ending

>I'm from /pol/ by the way

no need to mention that, it wasn't hard to tell

In Catholic theology the wife of christ is the church. Also christianity is sexualized as fuck, it just puts a thin veneer over it.

capitalism will end up getting rid of religion for good anyway, doesn't matter if it takes 10 or 100 years. all that will be left is a gimmick. maybe it can be marketed?

What you talking bout? Religion makes mad money.

I agree 100% with you, but you have to remember whether or not this is relevant for young muslims

I agree 100%, but even if it was in the interest fo capitalists to keep religion going they would not succeed. the fundamental changes a nation goes through after industrialization, turbocapitalism, to an almost post scarcity society we have now create an environment where religion cannot bloom.

>Insert GRRM 'Her cunt became the world' quote

Tell me Veeky Forums, is it really that impossible to write sex scenes properly?

Yes, sex is too savage and instinctive for this level of abstraction.

>You'll never write like Morrisey.

>At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.

>giggling snowball
>barrel-rolled
>bulbous salutation extenuating

10/10 cringe

>her sex