Related theme: The Desert Peach -- a German officer who happens to be gay.

Original tongue-in-cheek drawn books began in 1986. Series continues to this day. www.lulu.com/desertpeach

Wikipedia and Amazon.com: search: Donna Barr

Market: People with a little more education. Appreciated by a younger Jewish audience, as well as a gay audience.

D

Guess you've never heard of Visconti's The Damned. You're in Hollywood, so maybe you've never seen a foreign film. In terms of fiction, as far back as the early 60's, when Patrick Dennis wanted to signal a character was gay, he draped a big swastika flag across his bed. Social historians have show that gays were drawn to the Nazi party, in large part because of heavily homoerotic propoganda films. And, of course, Hitler's first major SS leader was gay (killed along with his lover when someone better came along).

In the future, please try to know what you're talking about before you post a letter.

Yes, George Soros on fascism once opined something along the lines of "No one ever fantasizes about having sex with someone dressed like a liberal," but this Nazi-related sexual fetishizing in cinema, TV, and literature I find as boring as I find troubling (and also boring) the often attendant association of Nazi-this with gay-that, even when it's Nazi-thuggishness with gay-closestedness supposedly in the service of showing the hypocrisy of (or the oh-so-human/all-too-human quality of) a character who is a Nazi. It begs the question: why for good or ill do these two tropes "Nazi" and "gay" even have to be in relationship with one another so often at all? Can we maybe pick a couple of other things? And this is not to conflate "gay" with "sex"--a conflation I think Elisabeth Vincentelli technically avoids and I that hope Littell also avoids in the pages of his novel. I find tired the interplay between Nazi-this with either sex-this or gay-this; but, Little apparently manages to bring both onto the train for the same ride.

I think I'll wait for the DVD.

The article's author refers to a gay Nazi as a cliche while in reality Nazis murdered gay men and put them into concentration camps, where scholar Eugene Kogan reports they were the worst treated of the prisoners. The author then refers to a man having sex with another man as being "sodomized"; is that how SHE thinks of two men having sex? She is quite the little Nazi herself.

This review made my day just for its favorable mention of Grossman, a writer talented enough to explore themes of totalitarianism and sadism without resorting to hackneyed clichés like the gay Nazi aesthete.

I'm surprised that nobody doctored Littell's urine samples to justify stripping him of his prizes.

Wait a minute--did Vincentelli really include "gay" along with "incestuous," "possibly matricidal," and "Nazi" in her list of shorthand descriptions which would make a narrator unsympathetic? Lazy.

That may well have been Littell's intention in writing the book. But, for me in the first hundred pages, it didn't come off that way. Though what Littell wanted to say through his protagonist was clear from the start, I never once felt that I was reading something I'd never seen before. Yes, God knows he'd done his research, but the narrative felt as if it were striving for importance rather than being important in and of itself. I was reminded of Proust's saying to the effect that a work of art that contains theories is like an object with the price-tag still attached. To be honest, Littell's novel seems a bit threadbare and handmedown.

Les Bienveillantes is not a literal history of the Holocaust, and a lot of the critics seem to miss that point. The central theme of the novel is that moral relativism is the pathway to social and cultural disintegration. There is an important scene about midway through the novel in which high ranking Nazis discuss their actions and state that they had replaced Kant's moral imperative with a "new" morality, one in which the will of the Volk, as channelled by the Fuhrer, becomes the true morality of the society. This "new" morality rationalizes the Holocaust as a kind of necessary evil, a steppingstone on the pathway to creating a better world. Littell's point is that such thinking makes all evil possible and that inevitably it leads to total social corruption and collapse.

I think it's apparent that Littell intended his message to have universal application. It was obviously aimed at those who see means justified by ends, and is directly applicable to present events. The novel serves as a caution to those who accept torture, denial of due process, and other human rights violations as "necessary" to preserve a society. I'm sure Littell is saying that such rationalizations may result, in the end, in there not being much worth preserving.

For that reason Les Bienveillantes is not only an important, but perhaps, a great work of modern literature.

Steven Kessel

I'd have to agree that when I browse the shelves of FNAC while visiting family in Bretagne, I never fail to be surprised at the dearth of satisfying new French literature. Say what you will about Barnes & Noble, it's packed with new literature of every variety, arising from the alleged American cultural wasteland. I flipped through Les Bienviellants in November and reckoned I'd rather catch up with some Baudelaire I hadn't read yet. I borrowed Kazuo Ishiguro in translation and bought a French language travel memoir about India. The new "romans" looked less like stories than moods, much like French cinema, which is to say they've left behind the genre. Or the genre has left them behind. Perhaps this is because, as they say, America is still living its history, while France is reflecting upon it.

I made it to page 100 and gave up. The research Littell undertook to write this hasn't been properly absorbed and processed by him, so it sits on the page as just so many facts and bits of local color--it never pops into life. His narrator is never convincing, being made up, as he is, of clichés (ah, the Nazi listens to great music at night when not killing Jews by day--we've seen that before). For a far more valuable psychological study of one such as Aue I would turn to Gitta Sereny's excellent books, Into This Darkness and her long series of interviews with Albert Speer.