Twenty Years After the Goncourt, Jonathan Littell Returns to His Favorite Monsters
The author of "Les Bienveillantes" is publishing a new novel centered on a bureaucrat inside a totalitarian regime, and talking to Bibliobs about why functionaries of evil keep pulling him back.
Jonathan Littell, who won the Prix Goncourt in 2006 for "Les Bienveillantes," is publishing a new novel built around the life of a bureaucrat serving a totalitarian regime, according to Bibliobs (Le Nouvel Obs). The outlet describes the book as an "extraordinary" return to the territory that made Littell's reputation two decades ago: the inner workings of men who administer atrocity rather than commit it with their own hands.
In the interview, Littell explains the pull of this material in blunt terms. "Comprendre le monde, c'est comprendre comment fonctionnent les bureaucraties," he says — to understand the world is to understand how bureaucracies function.
Comprendre le monde, c'est comprendre comment fonctionnent les bureaucraties.
Jonathan Littell, à Bibliobs
Bibliobs frames the conversation around a question that has followed Littell since "Les Bienveillantes": why does he keep returning to figures the interview calls, bluntly, "des salauds" — scoundrels, or worse. No title, publisher or release date for the new novel is given in the material available, nor any detail of its plot beyond the premise of a bureaucrat's life under a totalitarian system.
"Les Bienveillantes," narrated by a former SS officer, remains one of the most discussed Goncourt winners of the past twenty years. The new book's arrival, two decades later, is being presented by Bibliobs as a return to the same question that drove it: how ordinary administrative machinery makes extraordinary cruelty possible.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
