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Why, as the decades pass, do novelists—not to mention film-makers, biographers, and moral philosophers—grow more, not less, fascinated with Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II? Maybe the Nazi era is made more approachable because our vision of its horrors has blurred with time. But maybe, too, the world’s understanding has been sharpened by reflection and study. Stendhal aside, the golden age of literature about the Napoleonic era did not come in its immediate aftermath. A generation separated Waterloo from The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) and Vanity Fair (1848). Another generation would pass before Tolstoy wrote War and Peace (1869), posterity’s greatest effort to comprehend what Napoleon had wrought. We might therefore expect someone to write the great novel of World War II about now. And indeed, much of the French reading public believes someone has just written it. Jonathan Littell’s thousand-page The Kindly Ones has sold a million copies in France since it was published in the autumn of 2006. It won the country’s two major literary prizes (the Prix Goncourt and the novel prize of the Académie Française) and has just been published, to much fanfare, in English translation. The writer Jorge Semprun, a survivor of Buchenwald, gave The Kindly Ones his vote on the Prix Goncourt jury, calling it “the book of the half-century.”

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