I've been waiting years for the English translation of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, but now that it's out, I'm second-guessing myself. I know I'll read it eventually, but I wonder if it's worth its thirty-dollar pricetag. (Roberto Bolaño's 2666 sure as hell was, and I never thought twice about it.) Now, however, I think the purchase might be justified:

When you're talking about novels, the word for a completely worked-out world in which the characters act according to a grand design is escapist; when you're talking about life, the word for a world like that is totalitarian. The totalitarian state possesses infinite knowledge, and it perpetrates infinite crime, authorized by the leader's godlike will; its end products are mass death and documentation, which are the two means by which the fictitious world of its ideology are extended. Reality falls--or is pushed--out of the picture; what you have is an obsessively elaborated world that seems all the more real because it's shot through with myth. The totalitarian state is engrossing the way certain books, The Kindly Ones among them, are engrossing: it offers a complete world that masks the reader’s incompleteness; its fantastic descriptions set ablaze those lazy (or young, or sad) minds that want nothing to be left to the imagination.

Comments

[Stefanie]

I've been debating on this one too. I'd like to read it but I'm not sure I'd like to pay the hardcover price.