AN AMERICAN’S fictional memoirs of a Nazi murderer have set the French literary world alight, earning blockbuster sales, a top award and the contempt of some intellectuals.

As Paris enters its round of autumn book prizes, the cosy Gallic publishing world is struggling to cope with the runaway success of Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), an epic first novel written in French.

Jonathan Littell, 39, made history this week when his 900-page book became the first by a native English-speaker to win the Grand Prix of the Académie Française, the guardian of the French language.

The American novel, compared by critics to Tolstoy, Proust and Flaubert, has bulldozed the minimalist tomes of the usual Left Bank stars to become favourite for the Prix Goncourt, the most coveted award, on November 6.

The Académie prize was opposed by a minority of the “immortals”, as members are known, because its hero is an SS colonel who offers elaborate self-justification and horrific detail of his wartime atrocities in Russia and Eastern Europe. It also contains scenes in Auschwitz and in Hitler’s bunker. Hélène Carrer d’Encausse, the historian who heads the Académie, refused a call to read aloud shocking passages, Le Figaro reported yesterday.

The charge that Les Bienveillantes glorifies Maximilian Aue, its hero, and amounts to “Holocaust pornography” has come from Jewish leaders and some historians, but it has done nothing to dent sales.

Word-of-mouth pulled the book from obscurity to sell more than 200,000 copies since August. Gallimard, which received the manuscript under a French pseudonym and planned to publish only 12,000 copies, has used paper reserved for the new Harry Potter book to print thousands more. The novel will be published in Britain by Chatto & Windus in 2008 and by HarperCollins in the USA — after Littell has translated it into English. The publishers would not disclose the sum, but the rights, handled by a British agent, are believed to run into seven figures.

Reviewers have showered superlatives on what Le Nouvel Observateur called “a great book”. With their density and sweep, the reminiscences of the thoughtful SS killer have put to shame the minimalist modern French novel, in which the author usually agonises about his or her inner life, they say.

There is also widespread pleasure that Littell, a humanitarian worker for the past decade, chose French rather than the much more marketable English language.

Yet Littell, a Yale graduate who grew up in France and now lives in Barcelona, has attracted sniping and even faced charges that he could not have written the book. His image has not been helped by a reluctance to face interviews and his disdain for prizes. He said that he might not turn up to accept the Goncourt if he wins it.

Littell took five years to research and write the book after witnessing war in Bosnia, Chechnya, Congo and elsewhere while working for Action Against Hunger, a French charity. His father, Robert Littell, is a spy novelist and well known in France. He wrote in French as France is the land of his literary heroes.

Some intellectuals have accused Littell of trivialising history. Peter Shoettler, a Franco-German historian, called the novel a “strange, monstrous book” that was full of errors and anachronisms over wartime German culture.

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