Transgression

Daniel Mendelsohn

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The Kindly Ones
by Jonathan Littell, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell
Harper, 984 pp., $29.99

Like Orestes, the hero of the Greek tragedy to which its title alludes—and which, according to its author, has from the start provided his novel with its “underlying structure”—The Kindly Ones has been both extravagantly blessed and hideously cursed.

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