French History: Les Bienveillantes
Tobias Grey discusses the impact of a controversial historical novel that has become a literary sensation in France, and asks some French-based commentators and historians for their reactions.
'Imposteur …’ ‘genie …’ ‘farceur …’ Jonathan Littell attracts French epithets the way other writers do free lunches. Six months ago nobody in France had heard of this thirty-nine-year-old American-born novelist whose only previous literary output was a little read sci-fi novel written when he was twenty-two. Now his name and that of his novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) – a Dante-esque plunge into the daily toil of an ideologically confused SS officer – is on everyone’s lips.
Over 900 pages long and full of unsettling descriptions of the Holocaust, Les Bienveillantes (the title of which refers to the Erinyes of Greek myth), has become an unlikely bestseller. It has already shifted well over 400,000 copies in France alone. An English translation is planned for spring 2008.
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