Jonathan Littells bok “De Velvillige” fikk en stormende mottakelse i Frankrike, – og i Norge. Hvordan ville den bli mottatt i USA?
Michiko Kukatani er kritiker i New York Times. Hennes anmeldelser blir lagt merke til. Hun har lest The Kindly Ones. Dommen er knusende.
The novel’s gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness. Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, “The Kindly Ones” — the title is a reference to the Furies, otherwise known in Greek mythology as the Eumenides — is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies.
Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade, or by the warped narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” after repeated viewings of “The Night Porter” and “The Damned.”
Dette er den samme boken som fikk Goncourt-prisen i Frankrike og solgte 1 million eksemplarer. Norske kritikere var også overstrømmende. Jeg deler Kukatanis dom. Vureringen av Holocaust og dermed nazismen har endret seg de senere år.
Det foruroligende med mottakelsen av De Velvillige er at det ikke reageres på stil og tone, på utpenslingen av sadistiske detaljer, på det inautentiske i skildringen av hovedpersonen, Max Aue.
No doubt the author intends such remarks to convey the horrors of the Holocaust, but “The Kindly Ones” instead reads like a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks, pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies. That such a novel should win two of France’s top literary prizes is not only an example of the occasional perversity of French taste, but also a measure of how drastically literary attitudes toward the Holocaust have changed in the last few decades.
Whereas the philosopher Theodor Adorno warned, not long after the war, of the dangers of making art out of the Holocaust (“through aesthetic principles or stylization,” he contended, “the unimaginable ordeal” is “transfigured and stripped of some of its horror and with this, injustice is already done to the victims”), whereas George Steiner once wrote of Auschwitz that “in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent,” we have now reached the point where a 900-plus page portrait of a psychopathic Nazi, dwelling in histrionic detail on the barbarities of the camps, should be acclaimed by Le Monde as “a staggering triumph.”
Jean Améry skriver at han tror det bare er et spørsmål om tid før SS-uniformen i skapet blir en historisk rekvisitt på linje med alle andre.
Det Tredje Riket er en uuttømmelig kilde til fantasier om vold som teater. Littell har gitt seg hemningsløst hen, og Europa har ikke merket overflatiskheten og beruselsen.
Unrepentant and Telling of Horrors Untellable
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