The Kindly Ones - Couverture souple

Littell, Jonathan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0701181664 ISBN 13 : 9780701181666

Editeur : Chatto & Windus, 2009

Synopsis

With its brilliant, frightening, furious, apocalyptic vision, The Kindly Ones is a literary tour de force, winner of the Prix Goncourt and other prizes and already an explosive bestseller across Europe, selling over 1 million copies. This Faustian story with a terrifying twist is the fictional memoir of Dr Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, who has reinvented himself as a family man and owner of a lace factory in post-war France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat, who speaks out now not in self-justification but to set the record straight. He looks back at his life with cool-eyed precision: from a disrupted childhood and a turning point in his student days, to his role as observer and then participant in Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front, from Poland to the Caucasus; he is present at the siege of Stalingrad, at the death camps, and finally caught up in the rout of the Nazis and the nightmarish fall of Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures such as Eichmann, Himmler, Goering, Speer, Heydrich, Hoess, and Hitler himself. Massive in scope, terrifying in subject matter, and shocking in its protagonist, Littell's masterpiece is intense, hallucinatory, and terrifyingly compelling. Described by Le Figaro as 'a monument of contemporary literature', this transgressive and controversial work of literature has been compared to classics of world literature, including War and Peace. A huge novel about the seductive enormity of evil, about the ineffable horror of war, about man's inhumanity and the malevolence of the Furies, this is a book that every thinking person should read and to which no one can be indifferent.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Jonathan Littell was born in 1967 in New York of American parents and brought up and educated mainly in France. This novel, originally published in France as Les Bienveillantes, became a bestseller and won the coveted Prix Goncourt and the Academie Francaise's Prix de Litterature. Previously he worked for the humanitarian agency, Action contre la faim, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He now lives in Spain.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Chatto & Windus
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0701181664
• ISBN 13: 9780701181666
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 992
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible