The Kindly Ones: A Novel
by Jonathan Littell
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan LittellEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2010-02-02
ISBN: 0061353469
Number of pages: 992
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780061353468
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Kindly Ones: A Novel
Book Review: Twins, children and "pureblood" leanings
Summary: 5 Stars
I, too, have been haunted by this novel since finishing it a month ago. I've greatly enjoyed reading all of your different viewpoints and personal prisms through which you've made sense of this outrageous tome. Some have described it as a phantasmagoria; others see Max as a too-convenient Forrest Gump (who richochets via bullets and illness) to different settings, stumbling almost by chance upon the major events of the war.
The book sickened and fascinated me; a push-pull that never stopped from beginning to end. I find the long descriptions without paragraphs and chapters to beautifully demonstrate the fever-dreams of a person caught in multiple nightmares he can't maneuver from or out of -- and when he does, he goes home to murder his mother and step-father. The plethora of names, units, rations, accountings and tallies ad nauseum fill page upon page, and densely portray the mind-numbing bureaucracy that allowed people to check a box, do their part and move on to the next problem-solving venture. Of course, all these units and rations represent individual human beings . . .
The book made more sense to me by returning to its prologue and rereading it slowly and thoughtfully. There you'll find a reasonable, sane, tired, bourgeois businessman who now suffers from constipation instead of diarrhea. Here, calm recollection is rendered in simple paragraphs and easy-to-read prose. He manufactures lace, a delicate, beautiful veil that by its very nature cannot hide his gaps and ugliness.
He marries a woman to appear presentable and hoped for one child, but, alas, twins again enter his life. For me, the core of the novel is his love and lust for Una, his doppelganger, lost self, his twin. She is the only One he will love, because his entire life is built around self-love, self-regard and self-preservation (enough to cold-bloodly kill his best friend in order to escape). And what a potent symbol of the pureblood race Hitler and his ilk supported! What better way to preserve the bloodlines than to f___ your sister? (Sorry, the novel's graphic sexual content is another, parallel fever-dream -- sex and violence, also twin demons.)
No reviewer here has mentioned what I see to be the crux of the novel -- that the twins Max's mother and step-father are raising are Max's and Una's children. They're 12 years old (Max and Una are now 30 and were separated at age 18, she to a convent, he to school); his mother gives no explanation of her attachment to them; the two French policemen who haunt Max question why his step-father left all of his possessions to the twins; Max calls Una to report the death of their mother, in effect knowing she will go to rescue them. But there is not a hint, not a whisper, of acknowledgement on Max's part that the twins are his children.
Max (a clever name -- there is no limit to his sexual fantasies, appetites, explanations, descriptions, etc.) lives in the past, present and future. His twin, Una, and his forced separation from her shape all the rage and anger of his life; his children (the twins) witness his killing of his own mother and step-father; and now his twins and grandchildren provide a faint backdrop to his life as a French midde-class model citizen.
Max has three or four (maybe more?) breakdowns throughout the book, but I'd classify his time in Una's countryside manor as one of the most perverse in all of literature.
The images of children in the novel are very disturbing and slowly become more and more chilling and barbaric -- the young Jewish pianist who appeals "You're not going to kill me, are you?"; the sexually-provocative, crazed, dirty little girls, running like rats through the bombed-out floors of Stalingrad; the band of young butchers in the forest, etc. But, remember Max and his first encounter with a child: The little girl who approaches him at Babi Yar, gestures to the ditch when he asks about her mother and his "compassionate" response -- he hands her to the SS officer and says (lamely, ironically, chillingly) "Be gentle with her."
What happens to the twins of Max and Una? Are they raised in neutrality in Switzerland among the old ruling class (why did Una choose an older, wheelchair-bound husband)? Are they with us today? I'd say they are -- and that the bloodlines of perversity and butchery continue to bloom and reside in human hearts.
Summary of The Kindly Ones: A Novel
Named one of the "100 Best Books of the Decade" by The Times of London
"Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened."
A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Eichmann, Himmler, GÖring, Speer, Heydrich, HÖss?even Hitler himself?play a role in Max's story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic, The Kindly Ones is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity?and the reader cannot look away.
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