An Inconvenient Place

What is a place? A place where things happened, horrible things, the traces of which have been erased? Ukraine, for a long time, has been filled with these 'inconvenient places' which embarrass everyone, no matter which side of post-Soviet memorial politics they stand on: crimes of Stalinism, crimes of Nazism, crimes of nationalists, crimes of Russians; the killings follow one after another on this battered territory which aspires only to a form of peace and normality.

With the photographer Antoine d'Agata, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Littell began to survey Babyn Yar, the site of the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, and the traces left on the landscape. The war came to interrupt their work. It resumed quite quickly in another form, in another place, the small suburban town of Bucha, which became infamous after the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated there by the Russian occupying forces. Again, a place where things happened; again, a place whose traces we erase as quickly as possible. How then to write, how to photograph, when there is literally nothing to see - or almost nothing?

'Of the three ways of observing - as witness, whose meticulous, dispassionate descriptions become the fabric of the past; as voyeur, devouring the sight of the present with limitless appetite; as seer, finding in the now intimations of things to come - Jonathan Littell chooses all three at once. He doesn't flinch from the bare, intimate detail of Russia's visitation of death and destruction on Ukraine. Although sometimes the reader might prefer it if he did, it's not because Littell's visions are naked of euphemism, but because it falls to the reader themself to clothe these events in meaning. With his companion d'Agata, Littell, so fascinated by monuments, has made one with this book.' - James Meek, author of To Calais, In Ordinary Times

Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books of fiction, poetry and philosophy from French, including works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jean-Luc Nancy, and the majority of Jonathan Littell's work, includingThe Kindly Ones. Her translation of Compass by Mathias nard was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose.

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