Littell’s Big Controversy

We’ve written several times over the last few months about Jonathan Littell, the son of American spy-fictionist Robert Littell, who captured both the Académie Française’s top literary prize and France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt with his literary novel, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones). But now Salon is getting into the act, publishing a useful wrap-up article that recounts the peculiar furor caused in France by the publication (in French) of this damn Yankee’s “dense 900-page brick of a novel, told from the so-not-welcoming perspective of an incestuous, gay and possibly matricidal Nazi officer, and larded with graphic sex scenes and coolly detailed musings about the most efficient way to put Jews to work before exterminating them.” Read the Salon piece here.