Littell, Assouline, Simenon, Amette

I read since my last post an issue each of The Economist, The New Yorker, OK Magazine, and The New Scientist.

I also read Assouline's biography of Georges Simenon, followed by the first of 21 novels by Simenon. The biography was a quick, easy read, and it was not particularly insightful. I learned principally that Simenon suffered administrative detention after World War II for having published serialized novels in collaborationist newspapers. He was released fairly shortly. He also wrote anti-Semitic articles while a reporter in Belgium, and then featured anti-Semitic characters in his novels, even after the war. That gave me pause.

I also read Amette's Maitresse de Brecht, a post-war novel about East Germany and Brecht political wanderings. It was a quick, easy read, but I read it interspersed with a most affecting novel by Littell, Les Bienveillantes, and it struck me as lightweight compared to that.

So now I come to Littell. I feel strongly that any novel that is 892 pages long, even skipping (much to my dislike) the paragraph returns for the dialogue to save space, has to be pretentious in this day and age. I thought this book was about banal evil bureaucracies, as we follow the lawyer narrator through his memories of World War II, where he was a Nazi bean-counter. He engages in homosexual encounters without much affect being present, as far as I can tell, orders guards not to destroy a nest of ants in Auschwitz because a young prisoner is watching them, discusses politics and the menu of the train he travels on, receives without comment the suggestion from a superior that maybe he should get married, as people are starting to wonder. So I'm wondering why I should even read a novel that shows the everyday life of the people who came up with and put into action the Final Solution -- is the trivialization offensive? Why should I care what the minor functionaries felt after Stalingrad, waiting for Hitler to speak to them? Of course, I believe in the right of artists to broach any topic, raise any question. And then, doesn't the homosexuality make him something of an outsider, as gays were gassed too? So I'm going back and forth in my own mind.

And then, past page 700 somewhere, the narrator describes having sex with his younger sister, in quite explicit detail, and here I am thinking that this is the epitome of evil, as is the perpetration of the Holocaust, the one morally unambiguous evil of the 20th century -- until we know even more about the Stalinist purges and the state-induced famine under Mao. As the sexual acts come in quick succession, the sister is described putting her mouth on her brother's circumscribed penis. In Europe, of course, circumcision can only mean one thing. So here is the final reversal, the final play into moral ambiguity, where our Nazi lawyer bean-counter of the Holocaust is Jewish. So I know must suppose that the novel is about moral ambiguity, in the manner of Paul Verhoeven and his misunderstood satire, Starship Troopers, and his great film about the Dutch resistance, The Black Book. The novel is now being translated into English. I can imagine it will attract attention.