I’m tempted to learn French just so I can read Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes. Regular readers are probably aware of how eager I am for this book to come out in English (which won’t happen until 2008); in the meantime, I’ll just have to be content with reading about the controversy surrounding Littell’s massive tome.

The fictional memoirs of a Nazi SS officer written in French by an American are in line to win the top French literary prize, but critics are split over whether the novel is a new War and Peace or a piece of tasteless historical voyeurism.

Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) … has been hailed as “the phenomenon of the literary season,” selling over 200,000 copies and attracting the kind of reviews that most writers can only dream of.

[...]

But not all the treatment has been favorable. One critic dismissed the book as a “long piece of docu-fiction” and several have remarked with distaste on the novel’s fascination with death, obscenity, and degradation.

Others have also commented on the implausibility of its main figure, a Plato-loving homosexual who sleeps with his twin sister, murders his mother and manages, Forrest Gump-like, to meet some of the chief figures of his time as he moves from Paris, Stalingrad and Auschwitz to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin.

There’s more.

The charge that Les Bienveillantes glorifies Maximilian Aue, its hero, and amounts to “Holocaust pornography” has come from Jewish leaders and some historians, but it has done nothing to dent sales.

[...]

Some intellectuals have accused Littell of trivializing history. Peter Shoettler, a Franco-German historian, called the novel a “strange, monstrous book” that was full of errors and anachronisms over wartime German culture.

“Holocaust pornography” or not, the more I read about Les Bienveillantes, the more I start to question my own morality; I’m expecting the book to be pretty depraved. And that gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.