Excerpt from Submission by Michel Houellebecq, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Once I was made a professor, my reduced course load meant I could get all my teaching done on Wednesdays. From eight to ten, I had Nineteenth-Century Literature with the second-years, while Steve taught the same class to the first-years in the lecture hall next door. From eleven to one, I taught an upper-level class on the Decadents and Symbolists. Then, from three to six, I led a seminar where I answered questions from the doctoral students.

I liked to catch the metro a little after seven, pretending I was one of the "early risers" of France, the workers and tradesmen. I was the only one who enjoyed this fantasy, clearly, because when I gave my lecture, at eight, the hall was almost completely empty except for a small knot of chillingly serious Chinese women who rarely spoke to one another, let alone anyone else. The moment they walked in, they turned on their smartphones so they could record my entire lecture. This didn't stop them from taking notes in their large spiral notebooks. They never interrupted, they never asked any questions, and the two hours were over before I knew it. Coming out of class I'd see Steve, who would have had a similar showing, only in his case the Chinese students were replaced by veiled North Africans, all just as serious and inscrutable. He'd almost always invite me for a drink—usually mint tea in the Paris Mosque, a few blocks from school. I didn't like mint tea, or the Paris Mosque, and I didn't much like Steve, but still I went. I think he was grateful for my company, because he wasn't really respected by his colleagues. In fact, it was an open question how he'd been named a senior lecturer when he'd never published in an important journal, or even a minor one, and when all he'd written was a vague dissertation on Rimbaud, a bogus topic if ever there was one, as Marie-Françoise Tanneur had explained to me. She was another colleague, an authority on Balzac. Millions of dissertations were written on Rimbaud, in every university in France, the francophone countries, and beyond. Rimbaud was the world's most beaten-to-death subject, with the possible exception of Flaubert, so all a person had to do was look for two or three old dissertations from provincial universities and basically mix them together. Who could check? No one had the resources or the desire to sift through hundreds of millions of turgid, overwritten pages on the voyant by a bunch of academic drones. The advancement of Steve's career at the university, according to Marie-Françoise, was due entirely to the fact that he was eating Big Delouze's pussy. This seemed possible, albeit surprising. With her broad shoulders, her gray crew cut, and her courses in "gender studies," Chantal Delouze, the president of Paris III, had always struck me as a dyed-in-the-wool lesbian, but I could have been wrong, or maybe she bore a hatred toward men that expressed itself in fantasies of domination. Maybe forcing Steve, with his pretty, vapid little face and his long silken curls, to kneel down between her big thighs brought her to new and hitherto unknown heights of ecstasy. True or false, I couldn't get the image out of my head that morning, on the terrace of the tearoom of the Paris Mosque, as I watched him suck on his repulsive apple-scented hookah.

As usual, his conversation revolved around academic hirings and promotions. I never heard him willingly talk about anything else. That morning he was nattering on about a new hire, a twenty-five-year-old lecturer who'd done his dissertation on Léon Bloy and who, according to Steve, had "nativist connections." I lit a cigarette, playing for time as I tried to think why Steve would give a fuck. For a moment I thought his inner man of the left had been roused, then I reasoned with myself: his inner man of the left was fast asleep, and nothing less than a political shift in the leadership of the French university system could ever rouse him. It must be a sign, he said, especially since they just promoted Amar Rezki, who worked on early twentieth-century anti-Semitic writers. Plus, he insisted, the Conference of University Presidents had recently joined a boycott against academic exchanges with Israeli scholars, which had begun with a group of English universities …

Copyright © 2015 by Michel Houellebecq and Flammarion

Translation copyright © 2015 by Lorin Stein