Night and Cog: "The Kindly Ones
By Jonathan Littell
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
(Harper, 984 pp., $29.99)
The Kindly Ones has all the trappings of a Very Important Novel. It is a doorstop: 975 pages (plus appendices) in its English translation, heroically accomplished by Charlotte Mandell. Its cover heralds it as an 'international best-seller' (although this cynical American suspects that only in Europe can a book of such bulk and pretension sell nearly a million copies). Its author, Jonathan Littell, has a cool cosmopolitan c.v.: born in America, he wrote the novel in French, his second language, and currently lives in Barcelona. It bears a heavy thematic framework, mainly allusions to the ancient Greeks: 'the kindly ones' are the Eumenides, better known as the Furies. And did I mention that it is narrated by a Nazi?
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