France: A 39-year-old American recluse made French literary history yesterday by winning the country's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for his first novel, written in French, Les Bienveillantes (The Benevolent).
Jonathan Littell did not attend the prize-giving at Drouant restaurant. Nor did he grace the Académie Française with his presence when the guardians of the French language attributed their Grand Prix du Roman to him on October 26th. Littell is only the second person to win both awards in the same year. From his home in Barcelona, he let it be known that he is "indifferent to prizes".
The success of Les Bienveillantes is all the more extraordinary because it is the fictional autobiography of an SS officer named Maximilen Aue, recounting the massacre of Jews and communists in central Europe. Violence and death permeate every one of the book's 912 pages.
The novel recounts atrocities in detail: how the bodies of machine-gunned Jews were stacked head-to-foot, sardine-like, to fit into mass graves. It is a Dantesque portrayal of hell, with sickening descriptions of excrement and vomit, corpses floating down rivers and hanging from trees.
One episode of the narrator's delirium continues in a single sentence for two pages. There are no paragraph breaks, which may have reminded editors of another prodigy first published by Gallimard, Marcel Proust.
The son of the American journalist and spy novelist Robert Littell, Jonathan Littell was born in New York, grew up in France and worked for humanitarian organisations in war zones before writing the book.
"It is absolutely unique," says Michel Déon, the French académicien who defended Littell's book against stiff opposition in the académie.
"There has never been anything like it - not even Tolstoy's War and Peace, which at least had love. This book has not the slightest trace of poetry - it is the worst of humanity, the personification of evil." Max Aue "explains his homosexuality, his hostility to the natural world, where men have children with women. He has no feeling for the rest of humankind," Déon adds. "It's a relief to finish it. You cannot put it down, and at the same time it's so horrible that there are moments when you have to stop reading."
The novel has created controversy, with critics saying it is wrong to make a Nazi the hero of a novel, however negative the character.
The historian Florent Brayard accused Littell of failing "to respect the implicit pact that each of us makes with himself when he chooses the extermination of the Jews as a subject . . . One must be accurate and treat them with dignity".
Brayard accuses Littell of robbing the Nazis' victims of their dignity, for example using an authentic name when describing the sordid details of a Jewish man's death by hanging. Were Littell not Jewish himself, he might be more severely criticised.
Les Bienveillantes, whose title refers to witches in Greek mythology, has sold more than 280,000 copies in France since publication in August. Gallimard initially printed only 12,000 copies, but has now hired three printing presses working round the clock to keep up with demand. When it ran short of paper to produce the heavy tome, the publisher had to dip into the stock reserved for "Harry Potter".
Littell's British agent, Andrew Nurnberg, sold English language rights to Chatto & Windus in Britain and Harper Collins for the US, reportedly for close to $1 million (€786,287).
Though the Littell phenomenon has dominated literary news here this autumn, he is not the only native English speaker to have won a prize for a best-selling novel written in French. Nancy Huston, who was born in Canada, received the Prix Femina for Lignes de Failles. The Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou, now a US citizen who teaches literature at UCLA, yesterday received the Prix Renaudot for Mémoires de porc-épic.
The Irish writer Nuala O'Faoláin received the Lire-Virgin and Femina 2006 Étranger awards for the French translation of The Story of Chicago May.
The attribution of so many literary prizes to foreigners is "a well-deserved reward to people who have chosen the French language," says Déon. "It's curious," he continued. "At a time when French literature is in decline, France is the country most open to foreign authors."