美国出版商的冒险精神

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这次的销售是具有挑战性的。这是一本多达983页的、由Jonathan Littell执笔小说。原作是法文，而这次要出版的是它的英文翻译版本。
犹太、纳粹等敏感词汇都出现在这本小说里面，它究竟是否会大卖呢？

It was always going to be a challenging sell.
"The Kindly Ones," the 983-page novel by Jonathan Littell that went on sale on Tuesday, is a fictionalized memoir of a remorseless former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather. Oh, and it's been translated from the French.

Then again, long before the book was released in the United States by the Harper imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, it came with a laureled publishing history. Mr. Littell, an English-speaking American who decided to write in French and now lives in Barcelona, Spain, won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, as well as a prize from the Academie Française.

The book, published as "Les Bienveillantes" in France in 2006, sold around 700,000 copies there. A French critic compared it to Tolstoy's "War and Peace."

It was the talk of the Frankfurt Book Fair two years ago, and the subject of a heated auction here in the United States, resulting in Harper's paying, according to Publishers Weekly, about $1 million for the rights to publish the novel in this country. Now, as it hits bookstores — and the time is near when Harper will find out whether such a tome can earn back such a hefty advance — the novel is meeting a dramatically polarized critical response. Last week in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that "the novel's gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness," adding that the book was "willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent."

But on The Daily Beast (thedailybeast.com), Tina Brown's blog, Michael Korda, the former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and the author of several biographies, hailed "The Kindly Ones" as a masterpiece and Mr. Littell as a genius.

"I guarantee you, if you read this book to the end, and if you have any kind of taste at all, you won't be able to put it down for a moment — lay in snacks and drinks! — you will be upset, disturbed, revolted and deeply challenged," Mr. Korda wrote.

Reviews in Britain, where the book was published last week, have been similarly divided. In The Times of London, Anthony Beevor deemed it "a great work of literary fiction," while in The Sunday Times, Peter Kemp described it as "bloatedly inept."

Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper, said he was not surprised in the least by the reviews so far. In Germany, for example, one critic accused Mr. Littell of being a "pornographer of violence."

Mr. Burnham said, "The critical reception is exactly what we anticipated." He recalled that when he was talking to international publishers in Frankfurt two years ago, people were already fervently arguing about the novel. "I remember one eminent French publisher saying, 'This book is absolutely disgusting, it's vile,' " Mr. Burnham said. "But other people spoke of it with such passion that I realized the book was an extraordinary phenomenon in publishing terms."

Mr. Burnham and Harper have a lot riding on "The Kindly Ones," given how much they spent to acquire and market it. Several months in advance of publication, the publisher sent out about 4,000 60-page pamphlets to booksellers outlining the book's track record in Europe and including an interview with Mr. Littell and translations of some of the rave reviews from France.