The French novel is a hallowed institution, where legends like Balzac rub shoulders with Andre Gide and Victor Hugo, to name just a few. Some of the modern novel’s key conventions came from the French, and then there’s the influence. Almost every working novelist in any language today has at least claimed to have read Marcel Proust. But the French novel has languished behind its English cousin for some 50 years, at least since Albert Camus.
No wonder then, that when Jonathan Littell’s epic study of evil, The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes) was published in 2006, Le Figaro called it a “monument of contemporary literature” while Le Monde called it a “staggering triumph”, propelling the book to the top of bestsellers lists in France. Now, this French literary sensation has been translated into English and is drawing decidedly mixed reactions. The story is the memoir of an SS officer—a man of refined tastes and a gruesome butcher to boot.
Told in an uncompromisingly bleak style, the book asks a lot of uncomfortable questions about the nature of civilization. The jury is still out, but this massive tome (all 975 pages of it) will challenge you like few novels have in recent times. The icing on the cake is that this French masterpiece has been written by an American. C’est la vie!
—Bibek Bhattacharya
