The angle on Jonathan Littell that the media will pick up on is the colorful case of an American-born author writing in French. His award-winning novel The Kindly Ones was originally published as Les Bienveillantes in 2006, and only now appears in English in a translation by Charlotte Mandell. If Horace Engdahl, soon to retire as secretary of the Swedish Academy, is correct in claiming that American writers are too insular and parochial, what better way of breaking out of the box than to move overseas (Littell lives in Barcelona), write in French, and set your novel in Germany?
Yes, Littell’s background makes for an interesting sidebar story. But I would be the last person to advise you to read The Kindly Ones because of the author’s mailing address and passport status. (For the record, Littell holds joint U.S. and French citizenship, the latter granted, despite his lack of permanent residency and New York birth, because his "meritorious actions contribute to the glory of France.") The attraction here is inside the book, an ambitious novel that seems to hark back to an earlier age of fiction, in which authors — and, let’s be honest, publishers — still had confidence in big, sweeping, serious fiction on a grand Tolstoyian or Dostoevskian scale.
There will be a backlash against a novel so sober and sprawling. If you received a large inheritance and decided to replace your home with a skyscraper, the neighbors would be mad as hell. And the literary neighborhoods are hardly any friendlier than the Joneses next door. In the current literary world, which seems to have taken to heart the maxim that “small is beautiful,” a work on the scale of The Kindly Ones is likely to scare, irritate or intimidate many among those who make their living draining the ink-blood out of toner cartridges.
Certainly Littell does not make it easy for himself by tackling a 1,000-page Holocaust novel. With so many exemplary books out there that already trod this ground, readers may wonder what new angle Littell might have beyond what has already been covered in the history books, memoirs, films, documentaries, novels and other narrative accounts, to justify a work of such daunting length. After the subject has been treated in comic book form (Art Spiegelman’s Maus) told in backward chronology like a film in reverse (Martin Amis’s Times Arrow), brought to life in young adult fiction (Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit), and tackled in numerous conventional and unconventional novels by some of the finest writers of the last half-century, how does Littell stand out from the crowd?
Article comments
1 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Great review, Ted. I usually stay away from thousand-pagers, but your superb write-up, with all the right transitions and touchstones, have me inclined otherwise.
2 - Garth KATNER
Mr. Gioia:
I too enjoyed your review especially given the controversy this novel is generating in the US and Germany. Littell’s background does indeed make "for an interesting sidebar story." His short bio on the inside back cover mentions his humanitarian aid work in some pretty nasty war zones. Having a similar background myself, I can't help but assume these experiences inform much of his novel. It chillingly resonates with own experiences of "bureaucratized evil." But what is even more chilling is how inept individual mass murderers can be.
3 - Alvin Góngora
Some commentator writing on Toronto's "The Globe And Mail" says that Littell's had it easy at taking Nazis inherent evil as his starting point. The commentator is wrong. What I found unsettling in "The Kindly Ones" is that the characters are depicted as they surely were: well behaved, law abiding citizens. Telling the horror from the perspective of the prepretator is to me the key to this harrowing story. To my own horror, obedience seems to be a crucial aspect of human behaviour: it trains us to see the powers that be as the leading guides that we must follow, no questions asked.