Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell
(Gallimard, €25)
The rentrée littéraire season in Paris in 2006 was notable for the number of prizes awarded to novels by writers whose first language isn’t French. The anglophone Canadian writer Nancy Huston won the Prix Femina, while the Prix Renaudot went to Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese-born novelist who lives in the US. But the most newsworthy prizewinner was the American Jonathan Littell, whose novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) took the Prix Académie française and the Goncourt and has sold more than 300,000 copies in just over three months (obliging the publisher to requisition paper reserved for the next Harry Potter book).
Littell has attracted attention for purely literary reasons, too. Les Bienveillantes is a novel of remarkable ambition executed on a monumental—900 page—scale. It is set during the second world war, first on the eastern front and later in Paris, Berlin and occupied Poland, and draws on Littell’s impressive knowledge of the Holocaust and the war in Russia. But its real daring lies in Littell’s decision to write from the point of view of Max Aue, an SS officer attached to the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units which systematically murdered Jews and other civilians in the wake of the German advance on Moscow.
If you are a subscriber, please log in »
This article is available to subscribers only
Subscribing to Prospect is the most reliable and convenient way to receive the magazine every month, and offers the best value.Subscription Types:
Online
An online subscription offers you complete and unlimited access to the entire website, including our searchable archive of every back issue of Prospect, and a PDF edition of each new issue: all this for just £20 per year. Purchase an online subscription »Renewal
Renew an existing subscription »Institutional access
If you are a library, business organisation or any other large institution that needs a multi-user licence, you can obtain institutional access.
Share
Subscribe to post comments
Print
