Posted on 11/14/2006 4:33:37 PM PST by WmShirerAdmirer
'Les Bienveillantes' tells the story of a Nazi officer with no regrets.
'Les Bienveillantes' shot to the top of the French best-seller list in September shortly after its release at the end of August and found wide critical acclaim. Dominique Chabrol tells the story behind the book.
The author's story is almost as fascinating as the one is his book: son of a famous spy novelist, an American raised in France and now living in Barcelona, a former activist stationed in the globe's hot spots, and now winner of two top literary prizes in a country where writers rank almost as high as sports stars in the celebrity hierarchy.
Jonathan Littell, the 39-year-old son of US journalist and spy novel writer Robert Littell, this week won France's top literary prize, the Goncourt, for his novel 'Les Bienveillantes' (The Kindly Ones, or The Well-Meaning Ones), about a fictional SS officer's memoirs. The prize jury said Littell's debut novel triumphed over a field of works from French authors with a 7-3 vote.
A jury member, Jorge Semprun, said he was "stunned by this amazing book -- it's the literary event of this half-century."
The Goncourt comes after Littell already won this year's prize from the Académie Française, whose jury also chose the novel by an absolute majority.
'Les Bienveillantes' tells the story of an unrepentant Nazi SS officer who recounts his extermination of Jews in World War II.
Littell's triumph was the high point of an invasion of foreign writers who have invigorated France's literary world.
The Renaudot was awarded to a Congolese-born writer, Alain Mabanckou. His book, 'Mémoires de porc-epic' (Memoires of a Porcupine), is a fantasy tale about a porcupine named Ngoumba who explores an Africa brimming with humanity.
Nancy Huston, a Canadian-born author who writes mostly in French, and an Irish novelist, Nuala O'Faolain, walked off with the top categories of the Femina book awards, so called because the jury is an all-women panel.
Huston won the main Femina prize for her novel 'Lignes de Faille', which tells the story of a family through the eyes of four six-year-old children from successive generations.
O'Faolain took the Femina foreign writer's trophy for 'The Story of Chicago May', a fictionalised biography of an Irish prostitute and gangster in 19th century America.
The Medici for best non-French writing went to Norman Manea, a 70-year-old Romanian Jewish novelist who lives in New York. His 'Hooligan's Return — A Memoir' recounts his return to Romania after the fall of Communism. The book was already a sensation in France, where it sits atop the best-seller list with more than 250,000 copies already sold. The 900-page is soon to be translated and published in Britain, the United States and other countries after auctions that are believed to have netted Littell more than a million dollars. The English version is reportedly to be published as 'The Furies'.
'Les Bienveillantes' shot to the top of the French best-seller list in September shortly after its release at the end of August and found wide critical acclaim, much to Littell's own surprise.
"I thought that I would sell 3,000 copies, when they said to me 30,000, I said to them: 'You are mad'," Littell said. In fact, the novel has now sold more than 200,000 copies, according to his publisher Gallimard.
A true Franco-American writer
Littell is bilingual and wrote the book in French, though much of his research was done in English.
Born in New York to a Jewish family of Polish origin in 1967, he soon moved to France where he grew up and was schooled until the age of 18, when he returned to the United States for university.
For 15 years he travelled around the world, and spent a time working for humanitarian organisations. He now lives in Barcelona, Spain.
"What interested me was to understand what led people to become torturers," Littell has said in one of his rare interviews.
He first drafted 'Les Bienveillantes' over four months while living in Moscow. "It's certainly linked to my literary tradition which is more French than Anglo-Saxon," he has said of his instinct to write in French.
Describing the English language as "faster, more precise", the bilingual novelist said he kept English for use in his preparatory work such as figuring out the chronology or for organigrammes.
His methodical documentary research for the novel had involved locations in Ukraine and Poland.
"I did organigrammes to understand how it works, to understand the bureaucracy. I love that. I can easily spend two weeks on an organigramme," Littell said.
Littell first sent his manuscript to his father's literary agent in London, who several months later passed it on to four Parisian publishers.
Three turned it down, but Gallimard was immediately hooked.
The banality of evil
In fact, he had been mulling the subject for the novel — a first-person fictional account, without remorse, of the Nazi extermination of the Jews by a former German SS officer — for 15 years.
'Les Bienveillantes' is not actually Littell's first novel. His cyberpunk story 'Bad Voltage: A Fantasy in 4/4' was published in 1989.And after eight years of humanitarian work for the French charity 'Action Contre La Faim' (Action Against Hunger) in some of the most desperate corners of the world, such as Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya and Afghanistan, he decided in January 2001 to stop everything and write instead.
His experience in the field only fed into the tale of barbarism and the bureaucracy of horror. "For me, the essential thing is the question of the torturer, of political murder, of state murder," Littell said.
However, the boook has also had its detractors.
Franco-German historian Peter Shoettler called it a "strange, monstrous book", explicit to the point of "pornography" on the horrors of the Holocaust, and jolted by anachronisms and a wooden rendition of wartime German culture.
US writer's Holocaust novel takes French award Canadian and Irish writers win top French prizes But Littell, a discreet man by nature who has largely shied away from publicity since his book was published, has refused to enter into the public debate on how his novel may be received.
"Once I've finished the book, the line is drawn. It's an object on the table, people can do what they want," he commented.
Copyright AFP
I suppose this book's popularity didn't have to come as a big surprise, given the anti-semitism that prevails in France, Europe and elsewhere.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
"organigrammes..."
I must admit that I am unsure of what that means. The word is not in my Webster's, although I can draw a conclusion or two. Clues are welcome.
That's when somebody folds pieces of paper into little birds.
:+)
It's a French word for an organization chart. Someone evidently thought it was an English word too, and didn't bother to translate.
-ccm
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