An American novelist scandalizes France

Writing in French -- quelle horreur -- Jonathan Littell has thrown France into literary uproar over his sprawling novel about a gay Nazi officer.

By Elisabeth Vincentelli

Read more: France, Books, Books Features

Feb. 27, 2007 | "Who hasn't heard of 'Les Bienveillantes'?" asked the French magazine Politis in its November issue. In France, at least, that question is a rhetorical one: Unless you're a hermit entirely cut off from newspapers, the Internet, television and radio, you've heard of Jonathan Littell's novel.

Upon publication by the eminent Éditions Gallimard in August 2006, "Les Bienveillantes" ("The Kindly Ones") was greeted by a volley of rave reviews -- the Gallimard Web site includes blurbs in which Littell gets compared to Flaubert, Stendhal, Norman Mailer, John Le Carré, Balzac, Bach, Jean Genet, William Styron and Couperin; for the book itself, there are misty-eyed invocations of "Moby-Dick," "Die Götterdämmerung," "Apocalypse Now," "American Psycho," "The Deer Hunter" and "Life and Fate." Not bad for a 38-year-old newcomer, and not bad for his dense 900-page brick of a novel, told from the so-not-welcoming perspective of an incestuous, gay and possibly matricidal Nazi officer, and larded with graphic sex scenes and coolly detailed musings about the most efficient way to put Jews to work before exterminating them.

It's a pretty sure bet that Oprah's Book Club will look the other way when HarperCollins publishes the U.S. edition next year, after reportedly paying $1 million for the rights.

But getting critically acclaimed and selling by the truckloads wasn't enough. Soon, the novel found itself at the heart of an animated political and literary controversy: How could a Jew write from the perspective not only of a Nazi, but of an SS officer assigned to the Final Solution? Was a gay SS Nazi too much of a cliché? Has the era of the torturer supplanted the era of the victim in the arts? Did it make any difference that Littell is an American writing in French? Was his prose stunning, wretched or merely adequate? And his grammar, how was his grammar?

Every week, nay, every day this past fall, a new Op-Ed, analysis or roundtable would appear. Since Littell himself had pretty much stopped giving interviews after an initial promo round in August, critics, historians and just about anybody with an opinion and an outlet rushed to fill the void. Consider this: A mere six months after the publication of "Les Bienveillantes," there are already two books about it -- Paul-Eric Blanrue's "Les Malveillantes: Enquete sur le cas Jonathan Littell" and Marc Lemonier's "Les Bienveillantes décryptées." In addition, the entry about Littell's book in the French version of Wikipedia is 13,637 words long, while a little classic like Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" only gets 1,618 words and Tolstoy's "War and Peace" -- it's about Russia, you may have heard of it -- clocks in at a meager 553.

Visiting France from the U.S., where the fall's hot topic in the publishing world, relayed essentially in gossipy, sensationalistic tones, was the O.J. Simpson book and whether Judith Regan had made anti-Semitic comments, a sophisticated national literary conversation felt pretty damn exciting. I had not even heard of "Les Bienveillantes" before flying to Paris last October, but starting at the airport's bookstore, it was inescapable. So I gave in and bought the damn thing -- in a supermarket, no less. And then I actually read it from beginning to end.

So what's the really big whoop? "Les Bienveillantes" is clunkily written -- it often feels as if Littell is just regurgitating the enormous amount of research he obviously did -- and paradoxically uninvolving, considering its topic. Narrator Max Aue, a Francophile SS with a law degree and a taste for Rameau, finds himself, Zelig-like, present at various key times and places of WWII: He hangs out with French right-wing ideologues Lucien Rebatet and Robert Brasillach in Paris; witnesses the mass extermination of Jews in Ukraine; gets wounded in Stalingrad; returns to Berlin, where he organizes the use of prisoners to sustain the war effort; goes off to inspect concentration camps; somehow ends up in Hitler's bunker.

Through it all, Aue somatizes (he vomits constantly and is often victim of diarrhea), reminisces longingly and achingly about his relationship with his twin sister, indulges in aesthetic ruminations on music and literature, gets sodomized by rough trade and junior officers, and ponders the difference between rational and irrational anti-Semitism.

Only by the end does Littell's writing get into some kind of groove, especially in a lengthy semi-hallucinatory sequence that brings to mind Pasolini at his most scatological. But to get there, you have to labor through hundreds of paragraph-less pages larded with dry facts, flat descriptions and untranslated references to German military ranks. (I'm surprised none of the commentators seems to have mentioned Victor Klemperer's prescient 1947 study "The Language of the Third Reich," about the Third Reich's use of language to manipulate people, because Littell's constant use of terms such as "Hauptscharfuehrer," "Obersturmfuehrer," "Brigadefuehrer," "Obergruppenfuehrer," etc., is dizzying to the non-Germanophone, but also effectively suggests a society literally based on strict hierarchy. It's one of the few purely literary tricks in the book.)

What happened, then, was a swift reverse of what usually takes place in the U.S.: The debate about the book turned out to be a lot more interesting than the book itself. And in the process it revealed quite a bit about France and its complicated tango with literature, history and that big elephant in the lit room -- money.

Next page: Littell has incited French writers to pick up the gauntlet and shake up their dormant ambitions