Third Reich epic sparks bidding war

[Jim O]

Former aid worker's fascination with 'banality of evil' takes him to the top of French bestseller list


It is 900 pages of closely typed text, in French, with harrowing details of torture, mass executions, the bureaucratic battles at the heart of the Third Reich, incest, matricide and homosexual encounters - and now it has sparked an international publishing feeding frenzy.

Tomorrow, the bar of Frankfurt's Hessicher Hof, the period hotel that is the favoured luxury hangout of the publishing elite, will be packed on the eve of the city's annual book fair - and there will be only one topic of conversation.

'Everyone is desperate to get their hands on it. The sums being spoken about are astronomical,' said one literary agent.

Seasoned observers are talking about 'very significant six-figure sums' for the English-language rights to the book. 'There's a bidding war, so the sky's the limit,' said an analyst. 'Think of a figure and add lots of noughts.'

Nobody, least of all first-time author Jonathan Littell or his French publishers, Gallimard, expected such success. A single review in a Berlin newspaper provoked a flood of inquiries at Littell's London agents and a major deal was concluded with a German publisher last week.

Les Bienveillantes (The Furies) has stayed at the top of the French bestseller list since its publication a month ago. With 100,000 copies sold, it is listed for major literary prizes and French critics have lauded the book in terms unheard for many years.

'A stunning saga in the tradition of the great Russians,' said Le Monde, comparing Littell, an American educated in France, to Tolstoy. Marc Fumaroli, of the French Academy, called it 'an enormous saucepan thumped down on the table of a literary public dying of hunger'. For Le Point magazine, it is 'enormous, black, incandescent, the sort of book we thought was now impossible'.

Les Bienveillantes is the fictional memoirs of Dr Maximilien Aue, a Waffen-SS officer, and readers are plunged into a labyrinth of Nazi bureaucracy and mass murder.

It took its author four months to write after four years of research. Littell, son of US spy thriller writer Robert Littell, is a former aid worker who attributes his fascination with 'the banality of evil' to meeting genocidal killers in the Balkans and seeing mass graves in Chechnya and Africa.

Gallimard, the book's Paris publishers, attribute the success of Les Bienveillantes to the sheer quality of the work, but others are less flattering. 'There are two types of literary success in France, the authentic and the manufactured,' said one reporter at a literary magazine, who did not wish to be named. 'The success of this book is artificial. It is dependent on the whole publishing machine, with critics, journalists, editors and eventually the public building up a "buzz" that is not deserved.'

Claire Devarrieux, literary critic of Liberation, said she should 'throw a teaspoonful of cold water' on 'the roaring fire of enthusiasm for the book', dismissing it as 'a long docu-fiction'.

Also selling fast in France - 20,000 copies to date - is a translation of the 1944 booklet which advised British soldiers on how they should behave once they had crossed the Channel. The pamphlet is a sympathetic collection of observations, advising troops not to think that French women all dance the cancan or will leap into bed with them, and that some locals did resist the German Nazi occupation.

'It does people good to hear something positive in a sad time when the French are continually doing themselves down,' said the booklet's editor, Jean-Marc Savoye. 'In this time, when the future is not clear, it is logical that we turn to great historic events that we feel we can get a grip on to teach us where we are going.'


Source: The Observer

[Klaus]

Hope there will be a english or german copy available soon.