For instance, take the literary prizes -- Littell sure did. As soon as the initial excitment had started to calm down, the finalists for the fall prizes were announced and all hell broke loose again. Now, France loves literary prizes: The comprehensive Web site Prix-litteraires.net lists 982 of them -- not bad for a country of 64 million people. Out of those 982, however, emerge biggies with direct influence on sales (Prix Goncourt, Prix Renaudot, Prix Femina, Prix Interallié, Prix Académie Française, Prix Médicis). In an unprecedented coup, "Les Bienveillantes" was long-listed by all six; it ended up winning both the Académie Française and the Goncourt, only the second twofer in the prizes' history.
It's obvious that the foremost reason "Les Bienveillantes" has attracted such passionate interest is its basic premise: The story is told by an unrepentant SS officer. It certainly helped Littell's credibility that he had firsthand experience of the cruelty men are capable of, having traveled to the likes of Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya when he worked for Action Against Hunger, but that still didn't prevent many from reacting viscerally and violently to his choice of a first-person narration. In protest, a member of the Prix Goncourt jury symbolically voted for Elie Wiesel, who wasn't nominated. Best-selling author Christine Angot, whose "fiction" is transparently autobiographical, trashed Littell's book in the glossy gay monthly Tetu, arguing that as a Jew, Littell couldn't possibly write from a Nazi's perspective (she didn't seem to have a problem with a law-abiding man writing about killing, or with a married father writing about gay sex).
Experts obviously couldn't help piping in. A historian, for example, called "Les Bienveillantes" a showoffy prank in Le Figaro. One of the most prominent French authorities on the Holocaust vigilantly guarded his turf while harping on the book's graphic descriptions of sex, bodily functions and violence. As Natasha Lehrer wrote on the Jewish cultural webzine Nextbook: "[Shoah director] Claude Lanzmann, who has said that he considers himself and [American historian] Raul Hilberg the only people who understand how to represent the Holocaust, described Littell's novel as nothing less than 'a poisonous flower of evil' in Le Journal du Dimanche. 'In spite of the best efforts of the author,' he goes on to say, 'these 900 stormy pages are completely unconvincing ...The book as a whole is simply a scene setter and Littell's fascination for the villain, for horror, for the extremes of sexual perversion, work entirely against his story and his character, inspiring discomfort and repulsion, even though it's hard to say against who or what.'"
Which brings us to a particularly rich angle, that of the book's style -- an angle made particularly acute by the fact that Jonathan Littell, the son of popular author Robert Littell ("Vicious Circle," "The Company"), is American but, having been raised in France, chose to write in French. Not only had some unknown won both the Goncourt and the Académie Française, but an American unknown had won! The head scratching was endless: Was the book stylistically worthy or not? Was it loaded with grammatical mistakes and "Englishisms"? If yes, did it matter? Why were French novelists -- presumably lost in navel gazing and/or still under the nefarious influence of the experimental nouveau roman school -- seemingly unable to demonstrate similar breadth, erudition and ambition?
In a November interview with Le Monde, Littell himself pointed out that one of the possible reasons for his book's success was "a literary trend -- a demand for bigger, more fantastic, very constructed novels." Which, of course, is exactly what many say contemporary French novelists are unable to provide, a common complaint being that nobody in France knows how to write large-scale stories anymore.
And then there were the malicious rumors, also linked to the author's nationality: One implied that Littell Sr. was the actual author and Littell Jr. a mere translator, another that the book had secretly been written by its editor at Gallimard -- theories that feel lifted from one of Littell pere's thrillers. That gossip quickly died down, but not the formalist attacks. Among the mildest critics was the lit professor who termed the novel "neoclassical" in Libération. The most obsessive endeavor was by one Bruno Janin, who went through each of the novel's 894 pages with a fine-tooth comb, looking for grammatical and spelling mistakes, awkward turns of phrase and awkward word choices. Mostly he pointed out instances where something read like a too-literal adaptation from English, but he also let loose on general editing matters. Obviously plenty of badly written books come out every year in France -- the vast majority of them written by native French speakers -- but nobody ever dissects them with such single-minded ferocity.
Another point closely related to Littell's Americanness touched on the very structure of the French book business: Littell had peddled his manuscript via an agent (and under a pseudonym), a rare occurrence in France where writers tend to deal directly with publishers. Some wags wondered if using an agent betrayed a typically "Anglo-Saxon" commercial imperative -- despite the fact that an increasing number of French writers, including such heavy hitters as Michel Houellebecq, Emmanuel Carrère ("The Mustache") and Fred Vargas ("The Three Evangelists"), now use agents. The magazine Les Inrockuptibles magnanimously allowed that at least Littell was helping all authors by popularizing the use of agents in the French publishing world, which to many still feels ruled by antiquated rules and secrecy (by January, sales figures for "Les Bienveillantes" fluctuated between 395,000 and 549,200 -- a 39 percent difference), and where the house usually wins. As an article in Le Monde pointed out, "With 'Les Bienveillantes', we're in a situation in which the author seems to be earning rather more money than his publisher, which isn't that frequent when a book does well."
In the end, "Les Bienveillantes" isn't a great book, but we should be glad it exists. First, it launched an exciting debate of ideas, real ideas. And on a literary level, "Les Bienveillantes" may incite French writers to pick up the gauntlet and shake up their dormant ambitions.
But it's the very intimate relationship, the one between an author and a reader, that Jonathan Littell has indirectly reenergized: He must be hailed for prompting renewed interest in -- and in some cases the wholesale discovery of -- other, usually better, writers. After reading yet another reference to Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate," for instance, I picked up that 1959 novel (about the battle of Stalingrad, roughly speaking) out of sheer curiosity, and was stunned and delighted to discover a genuine masterpiece that does display the narrative complexity and anguished humanity absent from Littell's book. If "Les Bienveillantes" engenders similar discoveries among American readers when it comes out here, its very existence will be justified once more.
About the writer
Elisabeth Vincentelli is the arts & entertainment editor for Time Out New York.
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