Les Bienveillantes in English

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Chatto and Windus sounds like a name Pynchon could have come up with.

Laura

>
>"Chatto & Windus has won the auction for Les Bienveillantes--the 900-page 
>novel written in French by American author Jonathan Littell. The Random 
>House imprint's publishing director Alison Samuel acquired UK rights from 
>agent Andrew Nurnberg for "a significant" sum after she read the book in 
>French at Frankfurt. The offer is understood not to have been the highest 
>that was made."
>
>http://thebookseller.com/?pid=2&did=21157
>
>And in US
>
>A French Sensation Finds a U.S. Publisher
>
>
>By JULIE BOSMAN
>Published: October 26, 2006
>After a languid intercontinental auction that stretched for more than a 
>week, the American rights to Jonathan Littell’s novel “Les Bienveillantes,” 
>which became a publishing sensation in France, have been sold to 
>HarperCollins, the publisher confirmed yesterday.
>
>The British rights went to Chatto & Windus, an imprint of the Random House 
>Group in London.
>
>The book had gone up for auction on Oct. 17 amid much speculation about who 
>would bid and how much it would fetch, and many publishers anticipated a 
>quick resolution.
>
>“This is so deep and thought-provoking a work, we could not have possibly 
>made a flash decision,” said Andrew Nurnberg, Mr. Littell’s agent in London, 
>who administered the auction.
>
>“Les Bienveillantes,” which translates as “The Kindly Ones,” is a 903-page 
>novel written in French by an American author with a defiant Nazi SS officer 
>as its hero. It captivated the publishing industry this month at the 
>Frankfurt Book Fair, where publishers speculated that the American and 
>British rights could fetch as much as $1 million. In the first six weeks 
>after it was published in France, 280,000 copies were sold.
>
>Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice president and publisher of HarperCollins, 
>declined to disclose what the publisher paid for the book but said it was a 
>substantial sum.
>
>Mr. Littell, 38, the son of the spy novelist Robert Littell, was educated at 
>Yale but has spent most of his life in France and now lives in Barcelona. He 
>has already sold publication rights to the book for Spain, Italy, the 
>Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, among other countries. Industry executives 
>say the German rights alone fetched $567,000.
>
>The book will be published in spring 2008 in the United States and Britain, 
>depending on the speed of the translation.
>
>Mr. Burnham called the book a “masterpiece” but acknowledged that it would 
>not be an easy sell. “If there’s a challenge, first of all, it’s a long 
>book,” he said. “Secondly, it’s a book that delves into the darkest chapters 
>of history and the darkest realms of the human psyche. To pretend that it is 
>in any way a conventional novel would be a mistake.”
>
>Alison Samuel, the publishing director of Chatto & Windus, described the 
>book as “very, very disturbing, very shocking,” and “important for those 
>reasons.”
>
>Bids for the book had to be submitted by Oct. 17, along with what Mr. 
>Nurnberg described to publishers as a “love letter,” or a description of 
>their feelings about the book, how they interpreted its themes and how they 
>would present it to the buying public.
>
>Several publishers offered bids, among them Alfred A. Knopf and Spiegel & 
>Grau, an imprint of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group of Random House. 
>A number of others considered bidding but then dropped out, including 
>Grove/Atlantic and Viking, an imprint of Penguin.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/books/26boo.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
>
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