update: 900p french novel written by unknown American re SS man

[pynchonoid]

Le Figaro, 25.09.2006 (France)

It's the sensation of the "Rentree litteraire":
Jonathan Littell's 900-page novel "Les bieveillantes"
has already sold 170,000 copies in France. The story
of how the book came to exist is wacky enough. An
unknown Jewish American author writes the fictitious
memoirs of an SS man in French, offers them to
Gallimard and the book is snatched up despite the high
fee he is asking! Le Figaro litteraire writes this
week that the book is considered a top runner for
almost every literary prize this autumn, and reports
that it has caused "real tensions" between people at
the the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, two of
France's most prestigious awards: "Something like this
has only happened once before. That was in 1959, when
Andre Schwarz-Bart's novel 'Dernier des justes' was
the clear favourite for the Goncourt. However the
people there feared the women at Femina would jump the
gun on them, so they awarded the prize two weeks
before the planned date."

This week the Nouvel Observateur dedicates its title
dossier to the book. However as the dossier is
unfortunately not online, we provide links to a review
in Telerama, a review in The Independent and a short
interview with Littell in Le Monde.

And in an interview, Umberto Eco praises the European
"sense for history," which he opposes to the American
"loss of collective memory." After Jürgen Habermas
(see our feature here), Eco is the second major
European intellectual to sketch a critique of the
Internet: "The rule of the Internet, which delivers a
mass of non-hierarchisable elements, only aggravates
the loss of the historical perspective. Too much
information can be just as dangerous as not enough."
(In other words, the Bibliotheque nationale, with
restricted entry for certified researchers, is better
than Google Book Search!)

http://www.signandsight.com/features/967.html

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