The 3 best books by deep Jonathan Littell

A bad student who does not outperform his teacher, they used to say. A son is also a pupil when he undertakes the same task as his father. And yes, in the case of Jonathan Littel aims to surpass Robert, his father.

Because Jonathan Littell junior has that grand award to show with reciprocal pride to his father, nothing less than the Goncourt 2006. Since then, good old Jonathan has continued with his literary development reaffirmed in that know-how and patience necessary to become a writer himself.

From his youthful starts with works by science fiction or rather transgressive narrative proposals to an already more refined literature. A narrative of his with streaks of historical fiction, Kafkaesque existentialism at times and that taste for depersonalization and estrangement that events show from an ultimately heartbreaking lucidity.

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Jonathan Littell

The benevolent

Empathizing with the devil himself is something that I also tried in my book «The arms of my cross«. The question is to consider, as Terencio already said, that we are human and nothing that is human is alien to us. To show this new button from Littell.

Much has been written about Nazism but few have been the novels that have dared to penetrate the consciousness of a Nazi. In The Benevolent, Jonathan Littell offers us the point of view of the executioner, the SS officer Maximilien Aue, who, decades after the end of World War II, recounts first-hand his involvement in the war and in the massacres on the front lines. this one, when he was between twenty-five and thirty years old.

A convinced Nazi, without remorse or moral reproach, Aue assumes his commitment to Hitler's criminal machinery, as a member of the Einsatzgruppen, and therefore as responsible for crimes against humanity, in Ukraine, Crimea and the Caucasus. It narrates his intervention in the battle of Stalingrad until he is sent to Berlin where he works in the Ministry of the Interior under Himmler, and collaborates in the implementation and execution of the 'Final Solution'.

But Las benevolas is not just one of the great novels about Nazism and the banality of evil. It is both an inquiry into the dark side of family relationships and sexual obsessions. Max Aue lives haunted by the ghost of incest with his sister and by his homosexuality, the reason for his entry into the SS, and by hatred for his mother.

In this way, History and private life seem to intertwine in fatality, in the manner of classical tragedy. Not surprisingly, the title of Las benevolas alludes to Aeschylus's La Orestiada. Sophocles' Electra and Vasili Grossman's Life and Fate are other classics with which Jonathan Littell's novel dialogues. Las benevolas was awarded the Goncourt Prize and the Grand Prize for a Novel of the French Academy. And its readers number in the millions around the world.

The stories of Fata Morgana

After all, the most beautiful thing is brief. The orgasm without going any further. So an orgiastic reading must necessarily be brief, like a story that makes you shudder in that sigh of connection that fires neurons like sperm. The writer on duty always hides the shortest stories from him. But really the brief is just waiting to form a more consistent volume than the longest of novels. Because in all that brevity written by the author lies the magic of the craft.

While I was sleeping, I said to myself: I should write about this and nothing else, not about people or about me, not about absence or presence, not about life or death, not about things seen or heard, or about love, not about time. Besides, everything already had its shape. From 2007 to 2012, Jonathan Littell published the four stories that make up this volume in the small and risky French publisher Fata Morgana and which are now being translated into Spanish for the first time.

There were four beautiful, almost clandestine short books, of which no reviews ever appeared: the perfect laboratory for a writer who, like Kafka, thinks that "there can never be silence around what one writes." This slow period of development eventually led to the writing and publication, also in Gutenberg Galaxy, of An Old Story, a wildly expanded remake of the last story in this volume.

An old story

A novel that Houellebecq himself would be proud of. But of course, that means that you have to catch your reading at the right time and with the necessary predisposition. Of course, when everything comes together a magical madness is triggered where we go through all those planes that can describe our reality from unknown dimensions between consciousness, the other life and a trip through time.

«A narrator comes out of a swimming pool, changes himself and starts running down a dark passageway. Discover doors that open to territories (a house, a hotel room, a study, a larger space, a city or a wild area), places where the most essential human relationships are represented again and again, to infinity (the family, the couple, the loneliness, the group, the war) ».

The novel is organized in seven variations, where the action seems to repeat itself, the same family, the same hotel room, the same space for sex, for violence. But as everything repeats itself, everything falters, becomes unstable, uncertainty becomes the beginning. The very identity of the narrator is transformed, man, woman, hermaphrodite, adult, child.

In this way Littell builds an obsessive, suffocating, brilliant fiction about the underworld of the soul, in which once again he seems to want to treat evil from you to you. Jonathan Littell has written another master novel. As in Las benevolas, the reader does not leave his reading unscathed here either.