Bookplanet: French masterpiece, the big book of the Frankfurt Fair, bought for US

A French Sensation Finds a U.S. Publisher – by JULIE BOSMAN

After a languid intercontinental auction that stretched for more than a week, the American rights to Jonathan Littell’s novel “Les Bienveillantes,” which became a publishing sensation in France, have been sold to HarperCollins, the publisher confirmed yesterday.

The British rights went to Chatto & Windus, an imprint of the Random House Group in London.

The book had gone up for auction on Oct. 17 amid much speculation about who would bid and how much it would fetch, and many publishers anticipated a quick resolution.

“This is so deep and thought-provoking a work, we could not have possibly made a flash decision,” said Andrew Nurnberg, Mr. Littell’s agent in London, who administered the auction.

“Les Bienveillantes,” which translates as “The Kindly Ones,” is a 903-page novel written in French by an American author with a defiant Nazi SS officer as its hero. It captivated the publishing industry this month at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where publishers speculated that the American and British rights could fetch as much as $1 million. In the first six weeks after it was published in France, 280,000 copies were sold.

Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice president and publisher of HarperCollins, declined to disclose what the publisher paid for the book but said it was a substantial sum.

Mr. Littell, 38, the son of the spy novelist Robert Littell, was educated at Yale but has spent most of his life in France and now lives in Barcelona. He has already sold publication rights to the book for Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, among other countries. Industry executives say the German rights alone fetched $567,000.

The book will be published in spring 2008 in the United States and Britain, depending on the speed of the translation.

Mr. Burnham called the book a “masterpiece” but acknowledged that it would not be an easy sell. “If there’s a challenge, first of all, it’s a long book,” he said. “Secondly, it’s a book that delves into the darkest chapters of history and the darkest realms of the human psyche. To pretend that it is in any way a conventional novel would be a mistake.”

Alison Samuel, the publishing director of Chatto & Windus, described the book as “very, very disturbing, very shocking,” and “important for those reasons.”

Bids for the book had to be submitted by Oct. 17, along with what Mr. Nurnberg described to publishers as a “love letter,” or a description of their feelings about the book, how they interpreted its themes and how they would present it to the buying public.

Several publishers offered bids, among them Alfred A. Knopf and Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group of Random House. A number of others considered bidding but then dropped out, including Grove/Atlantic and Viking, an imprint of Penguin.