Alvah's Books

For a guy who swears he can’t stand doing interviews, Jonathan Littell has a lot to say.

Sitting in his Barcelona home after a day’s work and nursing a whisky while an unseasonably cold Spanish rain falls outside, the infamously media-shy author of The Kindly Ones stays on the telephone for an unprovoked 45 minutes. The immensely well-read graduate of Yale pauses for so long to consider each question that his long-distance interviewer keeps jumping in with the follow-up too quickly. In the background plays the kind of mournful violin concerto Hannibal Lecter listens to while making dinner.

Late in the interview, Littell, 41, makes it clear how much he dislikes talking to reporters. He says the unexpected obligations incurred by writing an international bestseller are the only reason he has agreed to speak to a Canadian newspaper, and he vows with future books to “tell my publishers I won’t do any interviews, any publicity, any promotion, and that’ll be the end of it.”

But even if he has a reputation for being prickly, he doesn’t come across that way. He is polite, funny and sincere in his discomfort — a philosophical unease that’s been felt by many authors before him.

“Hence the vanity of asking the writer what he ‘wanted to say’ … as if writing came from his wanting, from his free and sovereign will.”

Littel, in short, is not simply being difficult. “I deeply feel I have nothing to say on the matter, and the little I maybe did have to say at the beginning, I said it, and then it’s said and there’s no reason to say it again,” he says between sips.

“And I feel each additional interview just adds to the misunderstanding, because, of course, I never say properly what I want to say because I’m a lousy talker, so it just creates more misunderstanding.”

Misunderstanding is one way of putting it.

To read the rest of the interview click on the title.