Just Read: Les Bienveillantes

Besides winning two of the most prestigious literary prizes in France, Les Bienveillantes was generally favourably reviewed in the French literary press. Le Figaro proclaiming Littell as the "man of year"^[5] and the weekly Le Point stating: that the book “exploded onto the dreary plain of the literary autumn like a meteor.” Other reviewers compared it to War and Peace,^[6] with the editor of the Nouvel Observateur's literary section calling it a great book ("un très grand livre").^[7][8]

Negative reviews raised issues such as style, one critic feeling that it is a step backward from the modern novel, a style belonging to the 19th century "as if Proust, Joyce, Hammett, William Faulkner et Robbe-Grillet had never existed."^[9] Others criticised it from a historical perspective: Peter Schöttler, a Franco-German historian, called the novel a “strange, monstrous book” that was "full of errors and anachronisms over wartime German culture,"^[10] and in Le Figaro, French historian, Edouard Husson called the book a gigantic prank ("un gigantesque canular").^[11]

After the book was translated into German, there was wide spread debate in Germany.^[12] Littell is accused of being "a pornographer of violence"^[13], another critic concludes: "Nothing in this book provides anything new, either in terms of style or content."^[14]