Jonathan Littell, _Les Bienveillantes_, interim notes ii

I STARTED THIS five years ago--five and a half, actually--and am only halfway through it, but since that means I am now on p. 710, I feel entitled to record some notes.

--Littell must have done a power of research for this project, but some passages are so clotted with acronyms that I find myself wishing he had not (as it appears) decided to use every last bit of it. An appendix to which I have frequent recourse is there to help me remember that an SS-Obersturmführer is equivalent to an Oberleutnant in the Wehrmacht and that the RSHA is the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (central office for the security of the Reich)--but when I have to flip back to it four or five times to read a paragraph, I think, sheesh. Of course, it does make sense that Max Aue would routinely refer to such things in his memoirs, and it even makes sense that the SS was, among much else, a classic modern bureaucracy with its own classic modern bureaucratic arcana.

--World War II lore was part of my growing up; the war was only nine years over when I was born, so all through my school years I heard about Pearl Harbor, Midway, Guadalcanal, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and so on--not just through history classes, but through television, comic books, movies, and so on. But only rarely did I hear about what was going on in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which, it turns out, was absolute unshirted hell. I had learned a lot about this in recent years from Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands and William Vollman's Europe Central, but Les Bienveillantes presents it even more vividly. Aue is present at both at Babi Yar and Stalingrad, as well as a lot of more routine scenes of horror in Ukraine and the Caucasus. The novel is doing a lot to dislocate me from my western perspective on the war, and I'm grateful.

--the Oresteia parallel is emerging more saliently as the novel proceeds, and it getting more disturbing   as we go.

--The further I go, the more persuaded I am that the novel is just as brilliant as so many of its original reviewers said all those years ago. The Stalingrad scenes are unforgettable, and the hallucination with which the wounded Max's stint in Stalingrad ends may be the most amazing thing I have read this year--the Lee Scoreby episodes from Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass as written by L.-F. Céline.