BENT, LIKE THE SWASTIKA ITSELF:

Brooklyn Author Shakes Up Paris (JULES TRENEER, February 7, 2007, NY Sun)

Selling in droves and inspiring acres of newsprint, the standout novel in France this publishing season is Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes." This sensationalistic Holocaust story, which presents itself as the confessions of a gay, incestuous, patricidal S. S. officer living incognito in rural France, is stirring up controversy as well. Of course, a little notoriety about a celebrated French novel is not unheard of, but the nationality of this particular novel's author is. By season's end, Jonathan Littell, a Brooklyn native and son of Cold War spy novelist Robert Littell, had walked away with the grand jury prize of the Academie Française, along with the most prestigious of all, the Prix Goncourt -- only the second time in history the juries have anointed the same book.

In characteristic style, Parisian critics have greeted the book with a range of dramatic pronouncements. In the Nouvel Observateur, the writer and critic Jérôme Garcin wrote, "Never in the recent history of French literature has a debut novelist shown such ambition in his material, such mastery in his writing, such meticulousness in historical detail and such sangfroid." In same magazine, Claude Lanzmann, the director of the Holocaust documentary "Shoa," said the novel was useless for the reader who already knows about the Holocaust and not helpful to the reader who doesn't. "The accumulation of all its episodes and horrors produces mental overload and an unreal effect," he wrote.

Others are more circumspect. "I don't think it's a chef d'oeuvre, not at all," Claire Devarrieux, a critic for the journal Libération, said. "Honestly, I found the first 50 pages very weak. But I continued anyway because I had to. It's an ambitious book...parts of it are very interesting [but] I fault its originality. Where it is original is in the scope of the novel, but frankly -- the homosexual degenerate Nazi -- it's not original."

Indeed, that much, at least, is redundant.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 7, 2007 12:03 AM