Les Bienveillantes as Necessary

Les Bienveillantes, published in France in 2006, is the first novel of Jonathan Littell, an American-born, French-educated son of a writer and grandson of Jews from Russia. The 900+-page novel has been translated into several languages and garnered many adherents and adversaries. Along with colleagues such as Julia Kristeva and Daniel Mendelsohn, Susan Suleiman appeared in a number of public forums and published several articles on the novel in both popular and academic venues, expressing qualified admiration and subjecting it to the most penetrating lines of inquiry. As summarized by Suleiman, the novel is groundbreaking in

My initial reaction to this question is that, as a reader, I remain in a kind of limbo, not quite able to make up my mind whether, to quote Suleiman again, I ‘love or hate’ the book—or, in Kristeva's language, whether as a ‘naïve’ reader I am ‘convinced or disgusted’ (‘le lecteur naïf, le frère du narrateur Aue, en sort-il convaincu ou écoeuré’)—though I tend to throw in my hat with the latter. But as Suleiman demonstrates in more than one essay, and as Kristeva argues, the real work of the novel lies beyond the text itself, in the discussions and debates it generates. Kristeva likens its effect to that of a ‘colossal virus’ that contaminates the reader, bit by bit.