No I had not seen it. I must bookmark the nybooks web site. Thank you for the link!!!!
Looks like the English translation was better than the original in French (I guess that Mendelsohn read both given that he reads French). I remember that my main problem with Les Bienveillantes –apart from the historical documentation that sometimes felt like a copy-and-paste padding like the sort of things lazy students do–was that some passages were really badly written, there were a lot of mistakes in French (but Littell is American so many critics over here were rather indulgent).
Daniel's take on the structure and the references is interesting. I think that he is rather kind towards Littell, but I agree with him that Littell's aims were neither mistaken nor illegitimate.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-06-26 10:28 am (UTC)Looks like the English translation was better than the original in French (I guess that Mendelsohn read both given that he reads French). I remember that my main problem with Les Bienveillantes –apart from the historical documentation that sometimes felt like a copy-and-paste padding like the sort of things lazy students do–was that some passages were really badly written, there were a lot of mistakes in French (but Littell is American so many critics over here were rather indulgent).
Daniel's take on the structure and the references is interesting. I think that he is rather kind towards Littell, but I agree with him that Littell's aims were neither mistaken nor illegitimate.