“The Kindly Ones,” the 983-page novel by Jonathan Littell that went on sale on Tuesday, is a fictionalized memoir of a remorseless former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather. Oh, and it’s been translated from the French.
Then again, long before the book was released in the United States by the Harper imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, it came with a laureled publishing history. Mr. Littell, an English-speaking American who decided to write in French and now lives in Barcelona, Spain, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, as well as a prize from the Académie Française.
The book, published as “Les Bienveillantes” in France in 2006, sold around 700,000 copies there. A French critic compared it to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”
It was the talk of the Frankfurt Book Fair two years ago, and the subject of a heated auction here in the United States, resulting in Harper’s paying, according to Publishers Weekly, about $1 million for the rights to publish the novel in this country. Now, as it hits bookstores — and the time is near when Harper will find out whether such a tome can earn back such a hefty advance — the novel is meeting a dramatically polarized critical response. Last week in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that “the novel’s gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness,” adding that the book was “willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent.”
But on The Daily Beast (thedailybeast.com), Tina Brown’s blog, Michael Korda, the former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and the author of several biographies, hailed “The Kindly Ones” as a masterpiece and Mr. Littell as a genius.
“I guarantee you, if you read this book to the end, and if you have any kind of taste at all, you won’t be able to put it down for a moment — lay in snacks and drinks! — you will be upset, disturbed, revolted and deeply challenged,” Mr. Korda wrote. (Some of Mr. Korda’s books have also recently been published by Harper.)
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