The Kindly Ones: A Novel

To begin, let me simply congratulate all who have accomplished the feat of reading this novel, whatever your views on it. For it is truly otherworldly in its ensorcelling vision, and, like some bewitching, daemonic potion brewed and spewed from the bowels of the Earth, incites real nightmares, cold sweats and waking spells of horror. Just casually glance over these reviews and note how many of the brave readers admit to having nightmares from the reading of it. And yet, it is magnificent, scholarly, erudite, mesmerising, and therein lies our problem and wonder. Let's start with the title: The Kindly Ones or the Eumenides from Greek myth. In Aeschylus' trilogy of plays, Orestia, it is the euphemism bestowed upon the Erinys, or Furies at the end of the plays in the hopes of appeasing these supernatural beings. They are given a home beneath the Acropolis by Athena and promised that they will be honoured by the Athenians with this new appellation and no longer treated with fear and loathing. One wonders just how long such supernatural beings will be appeased by these blandishments, and both men and the society that they have created threatened again by what is buried underneath. The entire novel deals with the terrors of what happens when they are released from their gemutlich abode and return to their true form, and it is unrelenting. It is a credit to Jonathan Littell's wizardly prose and his success in creating such a compromised narrator, Maximillian Aue, that from first to last page we scarcely think of our author, 21st Century Franco-American Jewish author Littell at all, so pulled in are we by Aue and the talons of the Furies - so Dante depicts them anyway. The novel, as many readers have noted, raises more questions than it answers; and it is so exhausting and exhaustive that a reviewer such as myself can only cover what I see as the two most piquant themes here: The first is the supposed "inhumanity" of the educated, cultured Nazis such as Aue who turn into killers, mass murderers, torturers, and, as one reviewer here has it, in the case of Aue, psychopathic sexual monsters, all described in the gripping detail of twisted pink intestines in the snow, the smashed crania of children and merde, merde and more merde. The sight of it, the smell of it and, yes, even the taste of it are so richly depicted that it becomes a psychosexual motif in the book for all we'd rather not know about ourselves. About all this, our narrator has several pointed passages: "There was a lot of talk, after the war, in trying to explain what had happened, about inhumanity. But I am sorry, there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity." And, in the first chapter, so much resembling Baudelaire in Le Fleurs Du Mal: "But the ordinary men that make up the State - especially in unstable times - now there's the real danger. The real danger for mankind is me, is you." There are many other passages of this sort. But let me move on to the second more important, more encompassing point raised by this work by taking a cue from this last quote: What exactly is an "ordinary man"? A great part of the book is taken up by Aue's surreal, hallucinogenic, poetic passages describing his incestuous love for his twin sister Una. The themes in these passages of the book, of which Aue's homosexuality always seemed to me to be a symptom, make up the heart of the work and, indeed, as several astute reviewers have pointed out here, prevents it from being a meticulously researched "bombs and bunkers" book. A few professional reviewers have mentioned that this obsession seems to be "metaphysical" without explicating what they mean exactly. Aue explicates very well a philosophy with which every close reader of Plato, Plotinus, Shelley and Yeats will be very familiar. Here are some of the more pointed passages: "It wasn't just the question of my sister; it was vaster than that, it was the entire course of events, the wretchedness of the body and of desire, the decisions you make and on which you can't go back, the very meaning you choose to give this thing that's called, perhaps wrongly, your life." At the sight of dying, wounded soldiers crying for their mothers on the battlefield, Aue reflects: "Still, somehow I wondered if behind that mother there was not another one, the mother of the child I had been before something was irredeemably broken. I too would probably writhe and cry out for that mother. And if not for her, it would be for her womb, the one from before the light, the diseased, sordid sick light of day." Compare this to a stanza from the fourth of Yeats "Crazy Jane" poems: "A lonely ghost the ghost is That to God shall come; I -- love's skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb -- Shall leap into the light lost In my mother's womb." Briefly, and I don't have space to go into all this in an already overly long review, this is the "fall from the light" that each human's soul experiences upon birth in Neo-Platonic philosophy from what Shelley calls our "antenatal paradise." For the school's greatest philosopher, Plotinus, the object in life is a return to that "other light." But Aue is more pessimistic. Perhaps there is no return. One is reminded again of Yeats, from his poetic translation of another Greek play, "Oedipus At Colonus": "Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away." Or, as it may chance, slowly close this monstrous, bewildering book which fully lives up to the claims for it as art, art as a criticism of life.

Whoever said "War is Hell" knew whereof he spoke and, verily, The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell's magnum opus about a fictional SS officer during the reign of the Third Reich - is a vision of Hell. And a horrifying blend of fact and fiction. . . . A word of caution at the outset: This is a book you perchance might want to read to appreciate the author's artistry, or his virtuosity (as there can be no doubt that at least on some level this book is a masterpiece), or his grasp of history, or his understanding or "sense" of how things really were in Nazi Germany (or even merely as an intellectual challenge), but I assure you: This is NOT a book you will want to read for pleasure, or enjoyment, or entertainment. This is a laborious and arduous read. And for oh-so-many reasons. This book will exact from you a hefty investment - one of time, of mental effort and of emotional fortitude. The sheer size/volume of this book is staggering: 975 pages plus. My goodness, I can't even imagine the undertaking necessary to conceptualize the framework of this complex story, let alone flesh it out and compose it in such painstaking detail, as it must have taken a year to simply type it! It is massive! Mr. Littell is quite the adroit writer. (As well, Charlotte Mandell, who performed the translation of this tome into English from its original French, is to be commended.) This is a high school English teacher's dream, inasmuch as the reader - even a "serious" one - will encounter words - in both English AND German, in fact - that will have him scurrying to consult Webster! The vocabulary and syntax are often formidable. I strongly recommend reading this book with a dictionary handy. No, TWO dictionaries: one for English, and one for German-to-English translations as there are italicized German words sprinkled liberally throughout. (Footnotes might have been helpful here or at least a German glossary in the back.) Moreover, the sheer density of the prose is something to reckon with. Some passages go on for pages without a paragraph break; others go on for pages without so much as a period! The manner in which dialogue is conveyed is also rather unorthodox (and frankly sometimes confusing). The titles and ranks of the various military personnel and organizations described will have any reader's head spinning. This is where the glossary that does exist at the back of the book will come in handy. Your head will hurt trying to distinguish (and pronounce) the names of the various levels of military bureaucracy (and be forewarned, there is bureaucracy aplenty here!). The word obersturmbannführer, for instance, does not easily roll off the tongue (even when one is reading silently). And the reader will need a score card to keep track of the multitudinous characters that cross the protagonist's path as he traverses Europe. Finally, and most significantly, this book takes a great emotional toll owing to its subject matter and graphic depictions. There are some scenes that are so stomach-churning I had my regrets early on that I had even embarked on this read. One particularly jarring image, for example, describes a blood-splattered soldier laughing maniacally while he sits legless in the middle of the street after a bombing. There is a similar image much later on of another bombing victim (this one civilian) whose stockings remain intact, but whose head is missing from her torso. (The scenes that take place in Russia and in Auschwitz are things I don't care to touch upon in this review; anyone even peripherally familiar with WWII can well imagine the atrocities.) Then there are the overly vivid (sometimes verging on the pornographic) descriptions of the main character's various gastric upsets and, shall we say, perverse sexual inclinations. All in all, this book requires a strong stomach. Not for the squeamish or faint of heart, to be sure. When I finished this book my first instinct was to pick up a book of much lighter fare for my next literary excursion. . . . On to the story itself: The Kindly Ones tells the tale of one Maximilian Aue, a cultured, educated and not unintelligent young man who – instead of following his heart to become an artist or musician – throws his lot in with the Nazis and rises through the ranks. Despite his underlying talents, he is a deeply flawed individual with a complicated psyche who becomes more and more unbalanced and unhinged as the book reaches its shattering conclusion. Over the course of this story the main character’s military assignments take him from the killing fields of wintertime Stalingrad, to the allied bombing and decimation of Berlin, to the death-march during the evacuation of Auschwitz. (In the waning days of the war, when it looked to the Nazis that all was lost, they marched the inmates out of the concentration camp, not wanting their “prisoners” to fall into the hands of their Russian enemies.) It is significant to note that as an SS officer, Maximilian never actually engages in murder (not in an official capacity anyway), but by his very position is complicit in the genocide that took place during this black time in human history. The sickening rationalizations for this genocide, antisemitism and other barbarity are legion. There is one portion of the book which goes on for pages and pages and pages detailing the deliberations on the question of whether certain Jews living in the mountains of Eastern Europe (“Bergjuden”) qualify as “true” Jews “worthy” of being exterminated. The debate rages ad nauseum, and I do mean that literally. There is another section, which takes place during the Auschwitz phase of the book – also going on for multiple pages – where various political/military personnel (including Aue, who is there more or less in the capacity of an efficiency expert) quibble over the most cost-effective way to keep the starving concentration camp workers alive just long enough to be most productive to the Reich as slave labor. The protagonist is the quintessential sociopath in his lack of a conscience and his tepid post-war explanations. (“There is no such thing as inhumanity, only humanity.”) But I think where the author really did an outstanding job, in the course of telling the story of this particular individual Maximilian Aue, was his attempt to get into the Nazi mentality, something that most civilized human beings cannot comprehend. One of the things that I took away from reading this book was a tremendous and overwhelming sadness contemplating the immense human and bureaucratic effort entailed in the slaughter of a people and in the destruction of a continent. All that human effort that could have been put into something positive for mankind channeled instead into something so nefarious. That to me is the greatest tragedy. At the same time, one of the most uncomfortable aspects of this book lies in Aue’s assertion in the prologue (which in fact takes place after the war as he’s looking back) that given the right circumstances, we are all capable of doing what he did. This book is so multi-layered and multi-faceted that it provides much fodder for discussion. One analysis that I found of interest was the comparison/contrast between the Nazis (National Socialists) and the “Bolsheviks,” avowed enemies with something ironically in common: The author points out that the Russians make distinctions upon the basis of class, while the Nazis make distinctions on the basis of race. Regardless, I can’t wrap my head around the Nazi declaration of the Jews as “enemies” of Germany (or later on their description as a “resource” of the Reich for the benefit of their slave labor.) During all this heavy stuff, there are also various subplots to Aue’s tale concerning his twisted relationship with his sister, his homosexual lifestyle (notwithstanding his relationship with a woman by the name of Helene and in fact his later marriage to a different woman) and the brutal murder of his parents for which he is placed under investigation and pursued around Europe. There is, in my opinion, enough material contained here that any one of these subplots could have made for an entirely separate book. The last two chapters of this book are like a descent into depravity. We have the main character traipsing through a war-ravaged and corpse-strewn landscape. And then we have an ending like a frenzied fever-dream with elements including a bizarre assault on Hitler himself (whom he meets during an awards ceremony in the bunker), his attempted escape through the flooded Berlin subway, the re-appearance of the two detectives who have been pursuing him for the murder of his parents, the never-saw-it-coming murder of his friend, and the final crescendo in the Berlin Zoo among dying and fleeing animals. It is impossible to distinguish between reality and hallucination; we suspect more of the latter (since Aue at an earlier point in the story sustained a serious head wound), but given the war-time context, who’s to say. After all, to come full circle: War is Hell. I’m hard-pressed to place a rating on this book. It was no doubt a masterful piece of authorship (although I heartily agree with one of the oft-cited criticisms that it is way too long). I can’t say I “enjoyed” this book, but I feel it is unfair of me to put a rating on Littell’s grand achievement in writing it.

I just loved to read this 1000 page book in English, though I see it now as a mistake not having read it in German for obvious reasons. It is very intense and quite rough at some points, opening now and then to interesting considerations concerning the war, the "Endlösung", the NSDAP, and so on. It is undisputable that the author made a serious and very detailed research for writing this book, even if we do not always agree with him. But agreeing or not agreeing is not the point. The point is to let us be dragged for a few days throughout a world of extreme violence ruled by perfectly normal people, which adds even more brutality to the whole affair. Those who think this is a kind of "American Psycho" placed at World War II will be deceived. What we deal here with is an extraordinary and historically accurate fall into the German war campaign, seen through the complex and sometimes disturbed mind of SS officer Maximilien Aue. And believe me, he does his job so well that you really feel to be part of all that madness. The flow of the story is very catching and we will stumble against some delicious characters with strong and interesting personalities along the way. Some critics accused Jonathan Littell, the author, of plaguing the pages with unacceptable scenes of pornography. Well, this is not true at all. There is in fact at the beginning a short detailed description of homosexual sex and at the end of the book some good five or six pages describing a dreamlike sexual state of feverish euphoria by Max Aue, which I believe was aiming at a better comprehension of his fragile state of mind at that particular moment. Among the 1000 pages and between these two scenes you will find perhaps four more sexual mentions with short "pornographically" content, though nothing which could be called disturbing. To brand this book as dirty because of this is simply pathetic to say the least. To be honest, some degree of pornography in a book that deals with much of the horrors of war could even be desirable. Nevertheless, I believe that in this field the author was not up to the task. Much of those scenes and some rough language could have been left out, not because of the "moral question" but because they just do not fit in. Every time Littell wrote the word shit, there seemed to be some uneasiness in the air, like if the context and phrasing would revolt. It simply did not sound good and almost always felt forced and unnecessary. This kind of matters should be left for masters like Bukowski, where every dirty word has a golden taste. All in all a fantastic book that misses the status of masterwork by a few inches.

A richly researched, beautifully written, and deeply troubling novel about the most tragic historical event of the modern age - the Holocaust. It is about many other things too - family relations, sexuality, ideology, the individual and the state, friendship and mortality. It is also about sin and guilt. The novel is peopled by the willing executioners, from across the social spectrum, who brought the Holocaust into being, manifested primarily by Dr Aue, the conflicted and repellent narrator of this immense chronology. It's a long read, for sure, but the novel does bring something new and important to the literary canon of the Holocaust. In that sense, for the reader, it is a life-changing work, if not life affirming.

Just over halfway thru this book ie >500 pages. Disagree with many reviews . Really finding it interesting although formatting and chapters unusual. A few bits I have skipped thru where author gets in bit too much detail or theory but not too much. Good to get a different view point on these issues. Side story is to say the least unusual. Pity the author as not written other novels as I would definitely read. Recommend anyone interested in Eastern Europe theatre WW2 and Stalingrad

En general, me parece una buena lectura, la cual se ve perjudicada por ese formato sin apenas puntos y aparte (cuando los piden a gritos) y la abundancia de términos alemanes para designar las distintas jerarquías militares y organismos o sociedades. Viene un glosario al final, pero aún así habría agradecido que los hubieran traducido. El trabajo de documentación que ha tenido que hacer el autor me parece ingente, y aunque hay páginas y páginas de disertaciones que, por lo que veo, a muchos han echado para atrás, a mí me han resultado didácticas (admitiré que algo pedantes también).

Un libro geniale! Una volta iniziato non si può metterlo via. Sembra essere lungo ma alla fine volevo che ci fosse di più.