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,...
Subscribers to Prospect can read the rest of my review of Jonathan Littell's unlikely bestseller Les Bienveillantes in the new issue of that magazine.
