The Kindly Ones (Littell novel)
.jpg) |
|
| Author | Jonathan Littell |
|---|---|
| Original title | Les Bienveillantes |
| Translator | Charlotte Mandell |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Genre | Novel, historical fiction |
| Publisher |
Éditions Gallimard (France) HarperCollins (U.S.) |
|
Publication date
|
September 13, 2006 |
|
Published in English
|
March 3, 2009 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 902 pp (French) 992 pp (English) |
| ISBN | (French) (English) |
| OCLC | 71274155 |
| LC Class | PQ3939.L58 B5 2006 |
The Kindly Ones (French: Les Bienveillantes) is a historical fiction novel written in French by American-born author Jonathan Littell. The book is narrated by its fictional protagonist Maximilien Aue, a former SS officer of French and German ancestry who helped to carry out the Holocaust and was present during several major events of World War II.
The 983-page book became a bestseller in France and was widely discussed in newspapers, magazines, academic journals, books and seminars. It was also awarded two of the most prestigious French literary awards, the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française and the Prix Goncourt in 2006, and has been translated into several languages.
The title Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) refers to the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies The Oresteia written by Aeschylus. The Erinyes or Furies were vengeful goddesses who tracked and tormented those who murdered a parent. In the plays, Orestes, who has killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon, was pursued by these female goddesses. The goddess Athena intervenes, setting up a jury trial to judge the Furies' case against Orestes. Athena casts the deciding vote which acquits Orestes, then pleads with the Furies to accept the trial's verdict and to transform themselves into "most loved of gods, with me to show and share fair mercy, gratitude and grace as fair." The Furies accept and are renamed the Eumenides or Kindly Ones (in French Les Bienveillantes).
Andrew Nurnberg, Littell's literary agent, said that a possible one-line description of the novel would be: "The intimate memoirs of an ex-Nazi mass murderer." When asked why he wrote such a book, Littell invokes a photo he discovered in 1989 of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a female Soviet partisan hanged by the Nazis in 1941. He adds that a bit later, in 1992, he watched the movie Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, which left an impression on him, especially the discussion by Raul Hilberg about the bureaucratic aspect of genocide.
...
Wikipedia