Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
It is 900 pages of closely typed text, in French, with harrowing details of torture, mass executions, the bureaucratic battles at the heart of the Third Reich, incest, matricide and homosexual encounters — and now it has sparked an international publishing feeding frenzy.
On October 2, the bar of Frankfurt’s Hessicher Hof, the period hotel that is the favoured luxury hangout of the publishing elite, was packed on the eve of the city’s annual book fair — and there was only one topic of conversation.
“Everyone is desperate to get their hands on it. The sums being spoken about are astronomical,” said one literary agent.
Nobody, least of all first-time author Jonathan Littell, a former and worker, or his French publishers, Gallimard, expected such success. A single review in a Berlin newspaper provoked a flood of inquiries at Littell’s London agents and a major deal was concluded with a German publisher.
Les Bienveillantes (The Furies) has stayed at the top of the French bestseller list since its publication a month ago. With 100,000 copies sold, it is listed for major literary prizes and French critics have lauded the book in terms unheard for many years.
“A stunning saga in the tradition of the great Russians,” said Le Monde, comparing Littell, an American educated in France, to Tolstoy. Marc Fumaroli, of the French Academy, called it “an enormous saucepan thumped down on the table of a literary public dying of hunger”. For Le Point magazine, it is “enormous, black, incandescent, the sort of book we thought was now impossible”.
Les Bienveillantes is the fictional memoirs of Dr Maximilien Aue, a Waffen-SS officer, and readers are plunged into ‘banality of evil’, a labyrinth of Nazi bureaucracy and mass murder.
— The Observer
