http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/10/submission_by_michel_houellebecq_reviewed.html

Michel Houellebecq’s new novel Submission, which describes an Islamicized France of the near future, has been described variously as “melancholic” (Adam Gopnik), “melancholy” (Adam Shatz), and “extraordinarily sad” (Sylvain Bourmeau). It is a “tragedy” (Mark Lilla), one that ends on a “bone-chilling” note (also Lilla)—the total capitulation of a decadent academic French elite to a pious and paternalistic Islamic regime. Melancholy is in the eye of the beholder. To people for whom the idea of “Europe,” or more specifically “France,” looms large—with its spirited republican politics, its sectarian Christian warfare, its zesty laïcité, its Zola and Huysmans, its Drumont and Rimbaud and Corbière and Paulhan and Bloy—Submission may indeed be a pre-emptive bit of cultural mourning.