(Gallimard, €25)
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, an SS officer attached to the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units which systematically murdered Jews and other civilians in the wake of the German advance on Moscow.
It opens with Max, now a factory-owner settled anonymously in northern France after the war, addressing the reader: "Fellow humans, let me tell you how it happened." The complicity assumed here, which Max reiterates maliciously when he later insists "I am like you!" is integral to Littell's purpose. It allows him to broach, if not to answer, two closely related questions—one historical, the other moral or philosophical.
Littell has said in interviews that he asked himself the following: "What would have become of me had I been born German in 1913 rather than American in 1967?" That is a historical question, but it is also a question about moral luck. As Max puts it: "It's impossible to say that had there not been a war, I'd still have been led to such extremities." This sounds like self-exculpation, of course. But it is also a way for Littell to question the notion that evil actions are always committed by monsters whose motives lie beyond comprehension. If some evil acts are performed by people like you and me (and Max), then it must be possible to have an imaginative grasp of what it's like to behave in such a way.
Consequently, for Littell the moral problem is also an aesthetic one, a challenge that he attempts to meet by "getting inside the skin of a Nazi" and giving "the executioners" a voice. Max's voice is both that of the austerely unflinching observer who insists that one must never avert one's eyes from "calamity," and the laconic intellectual, forever urging his fellow officers to read Herodotus or Plato. When, for example, he learns of an order forbidding German soldiers from photographing mass killings, he is reminded of a passage in the Republic in which Leontius is disgusted by his irresistible desire to look at the mutilated bodies of prisoners. What the top brass cannot understand, Max observes, is that men can take pleasure in such looking.
The filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has complained that Littell is "fascinated" by his "villain" and that his preoccupation with Max's sexual perversions and bodily dysfunctions—the novel is swimming in shit and vomit as well as blood—ends up making him luridly unconvincing. This is a mistake: Littell's attentiveness is not pornographic fascination but the kind of imaginative sympathy only the novel is capable of bringing to its subjects. "Novelistic truth," he has remarked, "is of another order to historical or sociological truth."
