More on the Man of the Year - Jonathan Littell

According to the Forbes.com story about Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes may not be until 2008 that we’ll see a copy of Les Bienveillantes in English. I had to leave my Gallimard copy, almost 900 pages, back in Paris, having barely scratched the surface of this tome which Harper Collins Publisher Jonathan Burnham describes as a “great-epoch-defining literary novel”. I’m quite sure it is all that, but I haven’t decided whether I should make it my New Year’s Resolution to finish the French version BEFORE the 2008 version in published in English - or should I just procrastinate? I was also surprised to read in the Forbes.com story that Littell is not planning to do the entire English translation himself. Given the fact that he has translated several other authors, I wondered why he decided to entrust the brunt of the work to another translator. As I recently posted on Eric Forbe’s book site - the first twenty odd pages convinced me that this is a book better to read in the spring and summer than in the dreary winter light of Paris - in the meantime, I will be eager to know what other
Anglophones reading Les Bienveillantes in French have to say about the experience. Read previous entries on Les Bienveillantes.