Jonathan Littell's Early Études Prefigure The Kindly Ones

A new edition of Jonathan Littell's Études, published by Éditions Fata Morgana, collects four early works written between 1995 and 2002, before his celebrated novel The Kindly Ones. The 72-page volume presents these compositions as exercises in mastering technical difficulty while allowing artistic creativity to emerge. The Études contain key phrases that illuminate the intrusion of evil, such as "What prevented me from kissing her at that moment?" and "My choice, almost by chance, fell on a young black man." Bernard Dufour's accompanying text draws parallels between the hero of The Kindly Ones—an SS officer who commits incest, murder, and survives Hitler's downfall to become a family man—and characters from Flaubert and Döblin/Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz. Dufour suggests the Études are autobiographical, exploring themes of decision, entanglement in the machinery of fate, and the randomness of events that lead to crime or art.