This Book Will Send You to Hell

Last autumn, I finally read a book I’d put off reading for years because I suspected (rightly, it turns out) that it would be uniquely harrowing. Jonathan Littell’s notorious, extremely long novel of the Second World War, The Kindly Ones, was a tremendous success on its first publication in French in 2006 (as Les Bienveillantes). It won its previously unknown author the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, and was a bestseller in France and several other European countries.