The Kindly Ones By Jonathan Littell Translated by Charlotte Mandell McClelland & Stewart 2009, $29.

The difficult balance in achieving such an ethical framework and to refrain from banality, melodrama, and even potentially Holocaust porn has most recently been exemplified in the controversy around the almost 1000-page long novel by the Jonathan Littell, written in French and published in French in 2006, Les Bienveillantes and translated to English as The Kindly Ones.

So it should come as no surprise that the recent publication in Germany of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones sparked an unprecedented blizzard of controversy.