Jonathan Littell

Congratulations to Jonathan Littell for his Goncourt prize. He is the first native English-speaker to win the top literary award for new novels in French. Right, that's that out of the way. Now let us be honest. His 900 pages inside the brain of an SS executioner are an excruciating, unreadable, exploitative pile of rot. Les Bienveillantes has been a classic marketing success story. Some 200,000 copies were sold even before the Goncourt. But I have yet to meet a single person who has got past the first few pages. It is dense, overwritten and dull. I tried and gave up very quickly. It really makes you wonder about the book business. I simply do not believe that any normal person could enjoy the book. And yet look at the extravagant praise that oozed from the Paris literati. The event of the half-century, said Jorge Semprun. A hugely important original tome that it was morally imperative to read -- that was the message. As usual, ordinary people will feel they have been taken for a ride. It is a book for the cognoscenti who will no doubt congratulate themselves on their elevation above the masses. What bloody nerve. While I am in rant mode, this week's Le Canard Enchaine has fun pointing out some of the Anglicisms that permeate Littell's supposedly perfect French. Such as "engagement" for "fiancailles" -- and, it says, hundreds of others. A petty point maybe, but I feel very angry about this book --which does not deserve any of its adulation.