The main character of the kindly ones is a homosexual

The Goncourt 2006 prize was awarded Monday to Jonathan Littell for "Les Bienveillantes" (Gallimard) already holder of the grand prize for the novel of the Académie française and this, in total, in the "short list" of six literary awards in the first round by 7 votes against 3. It is the first novel, written directly in French, the American Jonathan Littell and the editorial of the re-entry event, since it has already sold to almost 250,000 best.

Jonathan Littell, who lives in Barcelona, was born in 1967 in New York. He is the son of journalist and American writer Robert Littell, specialist of the espionage novel. He travelled the conflict areas for fifteen years on behalf of humanitarian organizations prior to devote himself to the writing of his book: the confession on more than 900 pages of a former SS officer. Gilles Costaz was critical of the "kindly ones" in "Les Echos" from September 26. Here are key excerpts:

"The allusion to the kindly ones, i.e. to the Eumenides of Greek mythology, appears only on the last page and the final line of the novel proliferating of Jonathan Litttell.". Having painted a fresco where parade a decade Nazi and the six years of the second world war, the writer remembers these formidable justicières that the former, by mockery, also called the "very good" and which were sometimes comprehensive with criminals. It thus tends the hand to the fiction of origins, as say, ambitious, that there is great literature when the story reaches the supernatural aspect of the founding texts of the humanity. (...) From the fate of a man an SS officer , Littell reconstituted in its daily ferocity the interminable war Hitler and obsessive removal of the Jewish people and other minorities (Gypsies, homosexuals) crushed in the same "purifying" movement. The main character of the "kindly ones" is a homosexual. This "Obersturmbannführer" (Colonel) Aue hides his love of men and does that some prohibited adventures. It is not as ordinary as it sounds. Half French, it is totally in love with her sister, with whom he had an incestuous relationship. It is also cultivated, reader of Plato, Stendhal and Flaubert. In its contradictions, it builds its shell of the genocide and casual killer cold technician. (...) The book, impressive, exciting, open different in history and in the analysis of human identity. It's a technical story, the administrative account of Nazism and the genocide, including scientific information is remarkable. It is even a review of ideology and the currents of national socialism, through long theoretical discussions which may be thinking of the dialogues of the books of Malaparte. But it is also a fiction very daring bet, where the author refract the truth of the facts in the brain of a singular and guetté man by the irrational. (...) Littell illuminates the hell, is obsessed with painter to detail just shades and exact sensations of these moments of end-time. The book is the feat. Achievement of a writer who is not French, amazing transmutation of unknown and complex data. But the author struggling to breathe of love for humanity in the background of scenes often dry and a little applied erotic delusions. The effect is not as much and nine when a Pierre Guyotat was the Algeria war his fiction material. Rest Littell bouncing in athlete in fiction stage, grayed by its performance and dominant over a rival of the head and shoulders.