The Kindly Ones

The Kindly Ones
by Jonathan Littell

The Kindly Ones
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Book Summary Information

Author: Jonathan Littell
Translator: Charlotte Mandell
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2009-03-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 992
Publisher: Harper

Book Reviews of The Kindly Ones

Book Review: A monument to history, better left behind.
Summary: 5 Stars

Let me be clear about my title. I am not saying that the book is better left behind. Rather, I would say that the history it tells is one that we would all, I hope, prefer to leave behind.

But Littell doesn't leave it behind. He buries himself into that history, recording the experiences of Aue, which are fascinating even if, or precisely because, repellent. This history is not that of an ordinary man who falls in with the Third Reich, and this is not it's strength. I am sure there are such narratives but this is not it. Neither is this book stylistically imposing, in the sense of the language. I would have misgivings if it were, because it is in translation (for me). The writing is strong but does not stand out. It's the scenes imagined that are so powerful.

It is the persistence of the narrative to follow some of the profound contradictions and blindnesses of Aue and the Nazi party, as well as the tremendous visceral experience of the war. I suppose some of the latter would not be different in simple description if the setting was Sudan or Iraq or any of the conflicts of the past. But of course the context for this violence gives it it's own unique sense. As much sense as war can have.

Three moments stand out:
1. The advance of the Einsatzgruppe during the first part of the war into southeastern Russia. Mass killings under the aegis of preempting political opponents. Dreadful images. Ethnicity studies.
2. Stalingrad and the Germans' slow realization of the limit to their campaign.
3. Berlin as it fell. A scene at zoo in the final pages which is profoundly haunting.
In between a bizarre tragic family drama, which is compellingly told. And the intellectual underpinnings of the Nazis, inseparable from the family drama. The tensions between elements in the Nazi party. That was fascinating.

What is artful in this novel is the structure. It wears you out, exhausts you, emotionally, but keeps you following the details of the German war plan. And just when you have lost all feeling for humans because of the persistence of the images and maddening conflicts, you find at the end an image that perfectly arouses all of the emotion that you thought to have lost.

This is the most important book I have read for some time. I place it next to Bolano's 2666, in terms of contemporary achievement, intellectual substance, and fidelity to loss and mourning.

Summary of The Kindly Ones

"Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened." So begins the chilling fictional memoir of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France.

Max is 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. During the period from June 1941 through April 1945, Max is posted to Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; he is present at the Battle of Stalingrad and at Auschwitz; and he lives through the chaos of the final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures, such as Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heyrich, Höss, and Hitler himself.

A supreme historical epic and a haunting work of fiction, Jonathan Littell's masterpiece is intense, hallucinatory, and utterly original. Published to impressive critical acclaim in France in 2006, it went on to win the Prix Goncourt, that country's most prestigious literary award, and sparked a broad range of responses and questions from readers: How does fiction deal with the nature of human evil? How should a novel encompass the Holocaust? At what point do history and fiction come together and where do they separate?

A provocative and controversial work of literature, The Kindly Ones is a morally challenging read; it holds up a mirror to humanity?and the reader cannot look away.

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