PARIS (AP) – The latest novel by Michel Houellebecq, the bad boy of French letters, has been called everything from an Islamophobic rant to a “French literary suicide.” Imagining the election of a Muslim president in France, “Submission” struck a raw nerve when it came out this year on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.
But its English translator Lorin Stein – editor of the celebrated Paris Review literary journal – relishes something in the novel he says many critics miss: humor.
“It struck me as a much funnier book than the one they were describing,” Stein, a noted literary critic, told The Associated Press.
“Submission,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is released in the U.S. on Tuesday. A French best-seller with 650,000 copies sold, Houellebecq’s sixth novel has divided opinions in France more than any of his previous books. That’s no small accomplishment given the oeuvre’s mixture of explicit sex and politically incorrect opinions, and the author’s own past erratic behavior – antics that include passing out drunk during an interview and holding a press conference in a grocery store.
Houellebecq’s humor wasn’t easy to translate, Stein said, because “it is so deadpan and depends on a flatness of diction,” coming across more effectively in French than in English. One passage involving an aside by the narrator about the improbable sex appeal of a well-known French politician “was impossible to translate,” Stein said in a phone interview. “I forget what I came up with,” he said, “but that made me laugh so hard.”