Complete article at following URL: http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1865712,00.html
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John Mullan
Wednesday September 6, 2006
The Guardian
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Is it an advantage to write in a foreign language? This month's literary sensation in France is Les Bienveillantes, a 900-page novel about the Holocaust, written in French by an American, Jonathan Littell. Littell, who lives in Spain, was partly brought up in France and claims to have written this, his first novel, in French because he worships Stendhal and Flaubert. The fact that he is adopting a "foreign" language seems to have increased the book's impact. French readers and reviewers speak of something unprecedented, something unlike the usual elegant, patterns of French fiction.
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Virginia Woolf recalled Conrad as "a foreigner, talking broken English", and even if his grammar was good his accent was sometimes impenetrable. Writing was a kind of liberation from the impossible demands of pronunciation. Others have also found creative freedom with an adopted language. Vladimir Nabokov, who like Conrad had English as a third language, switched from writing in Russian to writing in English on emigrating to the US. He became one of the greatest prose stylists of this foreign language, playing with its words as only a foreigner might.
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