For a guy who swears he can't stand doing interviews, Jonathan Littell has a lot to say.
Sitting in his Barcelona home after a day's work and nursing a whisky while an unseasonably cold Spanish rain falls outside, the infamously media-shy author of The Kindly Ones stays on the telephone for an unprovoked 45 minutes. The immensely well-read graduate of Yale pauses for so long to consider each question that his long-distance interviewer keeps jumping in with the follow-up too quickly. In the background plays the kind of mournful violin concerto Hannibal Lecter listens to while making dinner.
Late in the interview, Littell, 41, makes it clear how much he dislikes talking to reporters. He says the unexpected obligations incurred by writing an international bestseller are the only reason he has agreed to speak to a Canadian newspaper, and he vows with future books to “tell my publishers I won't do any interviews, any publicity, any promotion, and that'll be the end of it.”
But even if he has a reputation for being prickly, he doesn't come across that way. He is polite, funny and sincere in his discomfort – a philosophical unease that's been felt by many authors before him.
In February, Littell published an essay about French writer Maurice Blanchot in which he wrote, “Literary writing does not explain, does not teach: It simply offers the presence of its own mystery, its own experience, in its absence of explanation, thus inviting not some illusory ‘understanding' … but precisely a reading.
“Hence the vanity of asking the writer what he ‘wanted to say' ... as if writing came from his wanting, from his free and sovereign will.”
Littel, in short, is not simply being difficult. “I deeply feel I have nothing to say on the matter, and the little I maybe did have to say at the beginning, I said it, and then it's said and there's no reason to say it again,” he says between sips. “And I feel each additional interview just adds to the misunderstanding, because, of course, I never say properly what I want to say because I'm a lousy talker, so it just creates more misunderstanding.”
Misunderstanding is one way of putting it.
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The Unkindly Ones is 984 pages long; it is also almost absurdly dense. A reader can go for pages without the relief of a paragraph indent; even long stretches of dialogue ignore the traditional format of a line break between spoken sentences, instead just continuing on in the same line with a dash to indicate a new speaker.
The book's real provocation, though, is that it recounts in tiny detail the memories of a former Nazi officer who escaped to France after the war and has been living under a false identity. The SS narrator, Maximilien Aue, clearly mad by that point, takes it upon himself to retell the horrors he witnessed and committed, in particular those he helped orchestrate as a key player in Hitler's Final Solution.
The book was originally published in French by the Paris house Gallimard, in 2006, and critics hailed it as a new War and Peace , a new Moby-Dick . Instead of selling an anticipated 25,000 copies, it sold more than a million. That same year it won the country's highest literary prize, le Prix Goncourt, making Littell the first American to join an honour roll that includes Marcel Proust and André Malraux – and also one of the few recipients to skip the award ceremony, instead politely sending his regrets from Barcelona, where he moved after the book's sudden success.
Outside France, the critics have been far less unanimous. Released in North America in March, the book was immediately labelled an “odious stunt” by a New York Times reviewer; the reviewer credited its success in France to the “occasional perversity of French taste.” (Other North American critics, including The Globe and Mail's, saw The Kindly Ones as a flawed masterpiece.)
