Les Bienveillantes (French Edition)

Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes" takes the reader through all the circles of the 20th century Inferno of Eastern Europe during the second world war. It may be read on one level as the modernist version of Dante's masterpiece: an architecture of the darkest places in the modern soul. The anti-hero begins as an idealist; his idealism leads him step by step into becoming a monster. Alas, he has no wise Virgil to guide him through the tortured landscape in which he finds himself. Like de Sade, he challenges us to justify our ethics and principles in the face of their definitive negation. I have often wondered how normal everyday middle class Germans could have become cogs in the Nazi death machine; this book provides an explanation.

Hopefully, an English translation will be available soon. I highly recommend this book to those with a passable knowledge of French. The prose is not overly difficult for an intermediate-level student.

Jonathan Littell's novel, if a novel it is, provides more questions than answers, more doubts than assurances and plenty more fears and anxieties than any book I have read for many years.
I have just read the Hebrew translation of this book, whcih has not appeared in English yet. I do not share the claim, in fact I despise it, made by some prominent Israeli critics, who argued that the book should not have been translated into Hebrew and that it should not be read by Jews or Israelis. I do share, though, with many readers, the disturbing and uneasy feelings that the book brings to the surface, and I suspect that some of my feelings relate directly to being Jewish and an Israeli.

Much as I try, I cannot ignore the fact that this particular book was written by a young Jewish writer (American-French). Jonathan Littell, in an interview with an Israeli leading newspaper claims that he does not feel Jewish and that his Jewishness is by no means the source for his decision to write the book from the point of view of an SS officer in Nazi Germany.

Surely it is not a coincidence that while reading the book I could not stop thinking about the fact that it was not written by a German but by a Jewish American-French writer. In my opinion it is an essential element in the attempt to grasp the magnitude of this novel, its messages and meanings to readers in the fist decade of the 21st century, more than 60 years after the Sencond World War and the Holocaust.

The book is powerful and effective. One can hardly stop even when one is repelled, disturbed and taken aback by the detailed, uncompromising and explicit narrative. I am left with questions, and a distinct feeling that I have not figured out half of what the writer meant. More than any book in recent years I am traumatized and obssessed by it, and unlike the writer - I have no Bienveillantes to sooth me or to put an end to this nightmare. It is a stunning, repulsive, nauseating,haunting, amazing, disturbing, agonizing book,and I suspect that these are exactly the reactions the writer wanted to extract from his readers, and perhaps this is why this book is so totally absorbing and a compelling read.

Les Bienveillantes is for the brave reader. Written by the American Jonathan Littell, son of the veteran thriller writer Robert Littell, Les Bienveillantes -- the term is roughly translated as "The Kindly Ones," the terrifying cognomen for the Erinyes, the vengeful Furies who pursue the blood-guilty in Greek myth and drama -- is the memoirs of one Max Aue, who joined the Nazi SS as a young man and served in it diligently through the twelve years of Adolf Hitler's supposed Thousand Year Reich. The book is a brilliantly researched blend of history, nightmarish picaresque adventure and Gothic horror tale. Aue is, by his own account, a monster. Haunted by but unable to escape his role in the methodical slaughter of the Jews of Eastern Europe, Aue is also a successful careerist eager for advancement and a psychically crippled sexual misfit.
And it must be added that Littell has given his Aue a sense of humor.
It's disquieting to read a book about the Nazi terror written in a fluent, compelling but somehow Americanized French. The unease, I think, is intended. We are not meant to believe that the horrors of totalitarian statism and Holocaust are the exclusive property of any one nation. They are not. Les Bienveillantes has won the Prix Goncourt. Reading it, I wondered if the melodrama wasn't too heavyhanded and the portrait of Max Aue too overdrawn. But I don't think they are. The book deserved its prize.

Written in fairly erudite French by an American author, the length, density, and style of this book, with its allusions to mythology, music, and literature, may make reading it an imposing task, a commitment really - but well worth the effort.

Maximilien Aue, the narrator and protagonist, is a monster in the same way that Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert is a monster. Like Humbert, Max is a well-educated, multi-lingual, intellectual, first person narrator who is able to evoke the empathy of the reader in spite of the horrible things he has done. The reader is mesmerized by the book while abhorring the narrator who recounts in detail his role as an SS officer in the atrocities committed by the Nazis in WWII. This chronological narrative is interspersed with "flashbacks" to scenes from the past that reveal his homosexuality and an incestuous relationship with his twin sister.

To a certain degree, this could be considered a metafictional work in that the narrator talks about his reasons for writing and frequently addresses the reader. The fact that the narrator now owns a lace-manufacturing business also suggests mythological connections between weaving, language, and creation.

The book is divided into seven parts, all bearing the names of musical compositions. Most of the chapters are very long with paragraphs that may run three or more pages. Dialogue flows into narrative without a break and what seems like straightforward description develops an oneiric quality.

As to the title of the book and possible translations into English, I, personally, think that it would be a mistake to translate it at all. Instead, present-day American readers might benefit from an introduction including the myth of the Eumenides - those mysterious, benevolent forces (Les Bienveillantes) that the narrator refers to in the last sentence of the book.

This is more of a brilliant and well-documented essay on the pervasive influence of Nazism in the Germany of the 30's and 40's (and beyond, in Europe), than a novel. As a novel, it falls apart after 150 pages. The reader loses focus, and points that have already been made are rehashed endlessly. In fact, I doubt this book would have been published at all in the US (the English-speaking world in general, where control of narratives is much more severe). Well-acquainted with the fascination of French-speaking readers for the Nazi era, Editors at Gallimard foresaw that the theme would accrue their fortune and let incredibly long and sometimes stupid digressions invade the book. And finally, there is the problem of the narrator, who as a sophisticated, philosophical, troubled affete homosexual SS is hardly beleivable. The poor SS officer faints at times when he sees the horrors perpetrated on the Jews. And yet, behind the scene, he continues unrelentlessly to make sure that the exterminating machine works to perfection. He is able to kill his own mother, step father and his best friend while listening to Rameau and Couperin... There comes a point (quite early on in the 900 pages) where you stop beleiving in him; that is, where you stop reading. And all the houpla about the book will not be able to force you...