The long and controversial novel, which received France's most distinguished literary awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman, is the fictional memoir of a former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilian Aue, a connoisseur of classical music and all things intellectual, a skilled bureaucrat, and a depraved murderer who feels no compunction about his actions. In unsparing detail, in dense paragraphs that run on for pages, Aue takes readers on a tour of a modern Hell: German military campaigns and massacres in Poland, Ukraine, and the Caucasus; the Battle of Stalingrad; the Final Solution; the collapse of the Third Reich. Aue watches men hanged with what he calls “evil fascination,” and Littell's readers, if they do not throw his book out the window, will discover uncomfortable truths in his descriptions of the various perversities to which those beholden to an ideology may succumb. “Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened,” he begins. “I am not your brother,” you'll retort, and I don't want to know.” Monstrous as Maximilian Aue may be, he is all too human—and we know him.