The Kindly Ones [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

An unknown American writer (even a bilingually educated one) who attempts to write an immense novel in French would usually expect to receive nothing but mockery for his trouble. As if the linguistic effort weren't audacious enough, then there's the subject matter: an epic of World War II gore and phantasmagoria from the point of view of a reflective--but largely unrepentant--German SS officer. It's the sort of literary high-wire act that should have ended in a face plant. Instead, Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillants" somehow swept France's top literary prizes when it was published in 2006. Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette histoire?

After a brief prologue in which the narrator introduces himself as a war criminal in hiding, the action opens with the Germans' brutal invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and concludes, almost a thousand pages later, with Berlin in ashes in 1945. The protagonist and narrator, Dr. Max Aue, bobs along with the flow and ebb of German fortunes on the Eastern Front like a stormtrooper Candide--except that he inflicts as well as endures enormous suffering.

Aue is not only an enthusiastic Nazi, but a first-class catastrophe of misdirected sexuality. Without giving anything away about his issues, let's just say that he gives anyone in Dr. Freud's files--or Greek tragedy--a run for their money. Yet whatever sympathy the narrator may occasionally earn for his tortured personal backstory, sporadic self-awareness and reliable literary flair is quickly squandered by his willing participation in many of the Nazi regime's atrocities, as well as several that are entirely his own.

Aue's idiosyncratic psyche is a literary creation and not--as some critics have mistakenly assumed--some kind of psychosexual explanation of Nazism of the sort once popular but now largely discarded. Littell has no grand new theories of evil to offer, and to the extent he makes the rather commonplace observation that we are all capable of it, this is actually undercut by Aue's spectacular weirdness. Nor does Littell shed much light on the "whys" of the Holocaust, although the attentive reader will learn plenty about the "how".

So why is "The Kindly Ones" worth reading? Quite simply, it's the sheer virtuosity of Littell's writing, which shines through in Charlotte Mandel's English translation, and does not falter even in rendering the most technically difficult and morally uncomfortable tableaus. His inventiveness jolts crackling energy into familiar history--an absolutely startling 87-page dive into the Battle of Stalingrad at the center of the novel being only one outstanding example. The awful grandeur of the subject, the breadth and depth of the author's historical research, the ease with which he shifts from naturalism to surrealism and allegory to farce, his perfect ear for dialogue in what is not only a foreign language but a completely alien way of thinking, the fearlessness with which he portrays the repellent--all of these are marks of a monumental achievement. If literary power is a function of ambition multiplied by ability, "The Kindly Ones" is simply off the charts.

It is, however, not for everyone. Many readers will be overwhelmed by the violence of these blood-soaked pages, others by the often-numbing bureaucratic detail of how it was unleashed. Some will find unendurable the Nazi ideology spouted at length by Aue and other characters (though not endorsed, it goes without saying, by the author). Those left unoffended by the foregoing will still have to contend with Littell's exhaustive--and I mean exhaustive--fleshing out of Aue's tormented sexuality. But even this side of the story is told with uncommon skill, and convincingly embedded with the tale of Germany's rampage and destruction.

"The Kindly Ones" is the stuff of nightmares--both the ones it tells and the ones it will give you. Either way, it's not a book that will be easily forgotten, and that in itself is a rare quality.

I read this in French when the reviews started coming out raving about it. I dont intend to read the English translation: once in any language is enough. But I found that I could not put it down once started. It is astonishing, compelling, revolting and, alas in all too many places, boring. As I was reading it, I was constantly reminded of Daniel J. Goldhagen's reminder of the physicality of the Holocaust: blood and brains spattering all over the murderers: you get the point. It struck me that this is where Littell is taking the reader: into the physicality of the heart of darkness. And there is a lot of that in this novel: too much, or just enough? I guess it depends on how you take it. Kakutani in the NYT didnt take it at all well. But I think still there is merit in Littells approach: this is perhaps the thing that art can do best, deliver a whalloping punch to the gut. And that the novel certainly achieves. On the downside, it does tend to go on and on; there are long passages describing Aue's dreams or hallucinations or whatever that dont succeed well at all, IMHO. I found myself skimming these passages after close reading of the first one. They dont seem to add much insight into Aue's character, psychology or motives.
The Kindly Ones will certainly not be to everyone's taste and Littell took a huge risk in tackling such a sensitive and explosive topic in the way he did. I have been haunted by this novel from time to time since I read it, but I dont regret it. There is a case to be made that it's garbage, but in the end, for me, I found it deeply illuminating in places, and ultimately satisfying as art. Human evil remains a mystery here and that is as at should be.

I became interested in reading "The Kindly Ones" because a review in the Guardian Weekly in March 2009 explained that this massive novel explores an intriguing question: how apparently ordinary people could have become complicit in horrors such as the Nazi Holocaust. I assumed that a book weighing in at just under 1000 pages must have something substantial to say on the matter, so despite some reservations about the lurid content (which I'll come to later), I bought the book. So if you are thinking of buying it for the same reasons, here's my impression:

The truth is that although the opening chapter of the book concentrates substantially on the "ordinary men" theme, the rest of the novel seems to largely abandon it. The most telling evidence of this is that having opened with a question, the book has no conclusion. It simply crash-lands where the narrative ends. And in case you're guessing that the book is *deliberately* left open-ended to keep the reader thinking, I must say that I find that hard to credit. The story just ... stops.

The moments that I have been able to identify, however, where the narrative *substantially* ponders the issue of "ordinary men" - and the horrors they perpetrate - are as follows:

p. 95:
Max Aue (the narrator), witnessing the massacres of Jews in the east, realises that his own urge to be "radical", his yearning for "the absolute" has led him to this point;

p. 147:
Aue muses that the apparent sadism and brutality of the SS is a result of them psychologically reaching for the converse of the pity for "the other" which they recognise in themselves;

p. 178/9:
Aue realises that he is becoming inured to the horror surrounding him, and attempts to regain that "initial shock";

pp. 589-93:
Considering the case of Untersturmführer Döll, Aue explains how a mere concatenation of chance turned him from an ordinary man into an executor of genocide;

pp. 623-4:
Echoing Aue's thoughts from p. 95, Dr. Wirths explains that the Auschwitz camp guards behave sadistically towards the doomed inmates because they cannot stand recognising their own humanity reflected in the prisoners, and so they beat them in order to "de-humanise" them.

... and that's pretty much it for the "ordinary men" issue. The rest is just a scattering of passing remarks on the matter.

Perhaps it's best to explain by way of a compare-and-contrast. Simone de Beauvoir's novel "The Blood of Others" (which is all about the Nazi occupation of France) ponders the (very existentialist) question of where each person's responsibility for the consequences of their own choices begins and ends. The novel is obsessed with this theme, and there's hardly an episode or inner monologue in it which doesn't serve to instantiate the problem. "The Kindly Ones", by contrast, shows no such adherence to a theme. It is merely a vastly detailed chronology of World War II from the perspective of a single SS officer.

So, here's a summary of the merits and demerits of the novel:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ IN FAVOUR: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. The book is vastly researched, a fact for which the author certainly deserves full credit. The novel was allegedly five years in the making, and the hard graft put into it does shine through. SS officer Voss's lengthy disquisition on the variety of languages spoken in Central Asia (p. 211, et seq.) is a good example.

2. The dialogue of the characters (and often the inner monologue of the narrator) is quite convincing. It really is easy to imagine that SS officers of the type surrounding Aue were as cynical and morally flippant in real life as they sound here.

3. The opening chapter, which muses upon the horrible totality of the Second World War, is quite impressive. One can easily imagine some of the passages in it becoming much-cited in the years to come.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ AGAINST: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. For some unfathomable reason, the author has chosen to make the narrator homosexual and incestuous. This generates two problems:

(a) Since these two features hardly co-exist in the "average" person, this somewhat torpedoes the novel's attempt to explain the Holocaust from the viewpoint of "ordinary men". The opening chapter ends with the narrator averring "I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!" Vraiment?

(b) One moment the reader is immersed in a detailed historical narrative, the next they find themselves facing an explosion of gay pornography (or an incestuous erotic fantasy). And for what? This recurring imagery contributes nothing at all to the exploration of the events of the second world war, nor to an understanding of the personality of the average SS officer. It seems to be there simply to offend.

2. And then there's the constant recurrence in the book of ... well, excrement. Dear God, sometimes there just seems to be merde, merde everywhere. The Guardian review did warn about the novel's "copious scatological and sexual references": in my view, they didn't warn enough. Again, I have no idea why the author chose to (figuratively) crap all over his own story like this. It contributes nothing at all to the narrative, and amounts to little more than self-inflicted literary vandalism.

3. The novel is less a Bildungsroman than a picaresque journey through Hell. This means that it's episodic and plotless. The narrator undergoes hardly any development throughout, and functions as little more than a lens through which we see his world. Thus the absence of a story-line may put some readers off.

4. Abandoned sub-plots. The narrator is desperate to locate the father who went missing during his childhood, but unfortunately the author seems less interested and so doesn't pursue the matter much. Also: at one point the incestuous theme inflates into an Oedipal one, with homicidal results. This induces the beginning of a narrative thread which, again, the author seems uninclined to resolve.

5. There are frequent dream sequences and hallucinogenic episodes. Since neither are real, they represent the abandonment of discipline on the author's part. Having taken flight from reality, he can now confect a kaleidoscope of symbols and imagery which might mean something ... or equally might not. Personally, I found these passages just too tiresome to cogitate over.

6. Max Aue becomes a Zelig-like figure present at most of WWII's major events in continental Europe, with the notable exception of the Fall of France. (I don't think it's even mentioned.) The book was originally written in French: was this omission deliberate? It seems odd, because Aue is a fluent Francophone. Also: as if it weren't indulgent enough to somehow wangle Aue into Hitler's bunker during the fall of Berlin, the author has him perform an act therein that's as jaw-droppingly daft and unrealistic as anything I've ever read in a supposedly historical novel. (You'll see what I mean if you read it.) Again, the reader is left scratching his head at such lunacy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And that's about it. I'm willing to grant that since I only read the English translation, some of the novel's more meritorious features may be more apparent in the French original. Having said that, I do feel strongly that much of the merde in this book sticks to the adjudication panels who awarded it the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française. By honouring an author who ruined his own book in this manner they have effectively announced to aspiring authors everywhere that they can be as filthy-minded and potty-mouthed as they like, and there will be no corresponding loss of literary merit. In this day and age, do we really need more vulgarity? A gratuitously offensive book may be deemed scandalous: but the scandal expands manifold when the book is edified from on high.