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The Kindly Ones

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

I'm not sure what to say about this book. I don't think I can really recommend it to anyone. It's too nauseating. On the other hand it has some quite interesting parts and I don't regret reading it, even though it was quite a slog at times.

The first-person narrator is an SS officer who works his way up through the ranks while observing various aspects of the holocaust. The plot is contrived so that we get to see the Babi Yar massacre, Stalingrad, the concentration camps, and the bombing of Berlin. At the beginning the narrator is a low-level officer who writes reports, and at the end he is a kind of management consultant for the concentration camps, trying to get more useful work out of the prisoners before they are killed. Meanwhile, while he is advancing to higher level positions, Germany is falling into (self-)destruction.

Aside from this, the narrator has some serious psychological problems, involving an incestuous relationship with his sister and the murder of his mother and stepfather. This is supposed to refer back to ancient Greek tragedies (the title of the book is a reference to Euripides). I'm not quite sure why this whole aspect of the book is necessary. I think the idea is that making the narrator a psychopath gives him a certain detachment from the events that he is observing and allows him to explain them to us better. (The narrator is also quite intellectual and implausibly well-read.) There is maybe also a consideration of the different moral system of the ancient Greeks, where what counts is only what you do and not what you are thinking.

Anyway the book is very long. Some parts are quite interesting, especially when the narrator studies the group decision making processes of the Nazis. What people were thinking is sometimes so completely crazy that one might think this book was a crude satire, except that this stuff really happened. There are some surreal and funny moments. Some parts of the book are quite tedious.

There are extended pornographic passages. For example near the end of the book, the narrator takes a break in the deserted house of his sister and her husband, where, while the Russians are advancing in his direction, he drinks up all the good wine and has about 50 pages of sexual fantasies about his sister, while pleasuring himself all over the house. I don't know, maybe this is what he needed to do to decompress after all he had been through. The killing is also described in pornographic detail. In short, the book deserves a hard NC-17 rating and is not for the faint of heart.

The level of historical detail is amazing. Not that I am in any position to judge whether it is accurate, but the author certainly brings the material to (repugnant) life.

Anyway, good luck to you if you decide to try to read this. By the way, I didn't read the English version, I read the German version, but that was enough for me. (The book was originally published in French; it received awards in France, while it was generally panned by the critics in Germany, although it was still a bestseller there.)

'The Kindly Ones': An Acquired Taste But a Powerful Tour de Force for Those with Strong Stomachs

By David M. Kinchen


Having plowed my way through the almost 1,000 pages of Jonathan Littell's "The Kindly Ones" (HarperCollins, 992 pages, $29.99, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell), I'm trying to figure out what's the source of all the controversy that this book on the Holocaust and Germany's war in the Eastern Front has stirred up.

It's really quite simple, in my opinion: Max Aue, the protagonist of "The Kindly Ones," is a Nazi Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel "American Psycho." Aue, a fictional character born Oct. 10, 1913, is how Littell, born Oct. 10, 1967, imagined how he might have behaved had he been born in Europe and became a dedicated Nazi bureaucrat.

By imagining Aue as a Nazi Patrick Bateman, I'm not spoiling the novel, written in French by the son of novelist Robert Littell. Jonathan Littell was educated in both France and the U.S., earning his baccalaureat diploma in France and earning his college degree from Yale University. Published as "Les Bienveillantes" by Editions Gallimard in 2006, the novel was a runaway bestseller in France, garnering two major prizes along the way and gaining Littell French citizenship in 2007.

Littell spent years of study accumulating facts for his novel, in which Aue, a law graduate of the University of Berlin, opens the book by telling -- in part; he saves the full story for the very end of the book -- how he escaped the war crimes trials, becoming a respected French lace manufacturer.

It helps that Aue is perfectly bilingual. Aue, or to give him his final title before the fall of Berlin in 1945, S.S. Obersturmbannführer Dr. Maximilien Aue, had a French mother and a German father. He was born in Alsace, then a part of Germany, now part of France. Littell provides a helpful glossary at the end of the book, with the Nazi military ranks and their American equivalents.

Many of the most dedicated Nazis -- including Hitler himself, an Austrian -- weren't German. Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi theorist and proponent of the racial policies that resulted in the Final Solution, was a Baltic German, from what is now Estonia, but a part of Russia when he was born in the 1890s. Otto Skorzeny, a Waffen S.S. Obersturmbannführer (Lt. Col.) who rescued Mussolini, was born in Vienna, Austria. Aue deals with Nazi units from France, Belgium, Croatia and the Ukraine, among other nations, during his service in Russia.

A Zelig-like character, Aue is wounded at the siege of Stalingrad in 1943, meets and interacts with Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer and other high-level Nazis, up to and including Hitler himself.

It's obvious to any reader of Holocaust literature that Littell's novel was influenced at least in part by scholars such as Daniel J. Goldhagen ("Hitler's Willing Executioners," 1996) and Christopher Browning ("Ordinary Men: Police Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution," 1992).

Aue is an "ordinary" man, albeit one who is highly educated and a lover of good music, fine wines and open to discussion about the world view of the Nazis. He tries to rescue Jews and other concentration camp prisoners from fanatical bureaucrats like Eichmann, but only to have them serve the war production goals of the Reich. He has no compunction about working the inmates to death under bestial conditions.

Aue is also predominantly homosexual, although he's sexually obsessed with his twin sister Una. His friends tell him to get married, that his single state and lack of interest in women is calling attention to himself in a regime where "Aryan" men are supposed to do their part to keep the master race populated. Attractive, willing women are constantly provided to Dr. Aue, but he always has excuses to reject their sexual advances.

Adding a comic touch to a novel that has more than a few instances of black humor are two German police detectives, Weser and Clemens, who are trying to pin a double murder on Aue. The murders took place in the part of the French Riviera occupied by the Italians during WW II. When he least expects it -- in the manner of TV Detective Columbo -- Aue is confronted by the duo, who claim to know of evidence that ties Aue to the murders. All this at a time when the Germans and their collaborators are murdering millions and themselves are being bombed into the stone age by the Allies.

I also found it comic when the powers in Berlin send a dour Fraulein Doktor to the Caucasus where Aue is stationed to determine if a tribe of so-called Berg Juden (mountain Jews) are "racially" Jewish or were converts. This recalls the Khazars, a non-Semitic people who converted to Judaism and ruled the Caucasus and Volga basin from the Seventh to 11th centuries. According to a thesis advanced by Arthur Koestler in "The Thirteenth Tribe", published in 1976, the Khazars, uprooted from their empire by Mongol invaders from the east, moved to the Ukraine and Poland and became the ancestors of most of Europe's Jews. Anti-Semites have used this thesis to say Jews have no claim to Israel.

Littell, through his character Max Aue, vividly portrays the increasingly dangerous life in Germany, particularly Berlin, in the closing months of the war. His perspective is that of victims of allied bombing attacks. The erstwhile victors were discovering how it felt to be on the receiving end of bombing.

For a different point of view, I recommend the diaries of Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), a German Jew whose life was saved by the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In two volumes of his diaries, published after the war, Klemperer described the ordinary humiliations of daily life in Nazi Germany. Even though he had converted to Protestantism in 1912 and had served as a volunteer in the imperial German Army in World War I, in 1935, under the Nuremberg race laws, he was stripped of his academic position, citizenship and freedom and eventually forced to work in a factory and as a day laborer. He escaped deportation and death until an order came down the night before the firebombing of Dresden. He and his family escaped and lived to see the publication of his accounts of daily life under the Nazi tyranny.

Just as Littell chronicles the wartime hardships of the so-called "Aryan" Germans, Klemperer's diary describes the daily life of restricted Jews under the Nazis. They were even forbidden to keep pets, and one entry, in May 1942, particularly struck me because I'm a cat person, they had to put down their cat, a tomcat named Muschel.

If the name sounds familiar, it's because Victor Klemperer came from the celebrated family that produced the orchestra conductor Otto Klemperer, a cousin of Victor's father. Victor was a second cousin of actor Werner Klemperer (1920-2000), a son of Otto Klemperer who is most remembered for playing Nazi Col. Klink in the TV show "Hogan's Heroes."

Littell's achievement is monumental, but the book is not for the faint of heart -- or stomach. His often interminable paragraphs describe bodily functions in graphic terms. With these caveats, I recommend it as a major literary work that is destined to be a highly controversial classic.

In 2006, an American raised in France named Jonathan Littell published a near-1000 page novel in French entitled Les Bienveillantes (The Well-Meaning, now heroically and generally well-translated by Charlotte Mandell as The Kindly Ones). The novel tells the story of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who survived the horrors of World War II and reinvented himself as a lace manufacturer and family man in post-war France. Dr. Aue is a highly educated man, well-versed in literature, philosophy, music and the arts. He is also a serial killer, who before the end of the novel not only murders his parents with his own hand but also supervises and plays a role in the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, the mentally impaired and other groups deemed enemies of the Nazi regime. As you might imagine, Les Bienveillantes was highly controversial when it was published in France. It was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt but evoked both great praise and loud approbation for its depiction of a deeply twisted soul and a regime that engaged in acts so horrific that they remain fundamentally unexplainable to this day. I find myself squarely in the camp of those who consider Mr. Littell's novel one of the greatest and most morally complex works of literature that I have read in my lifetime.

While many critics have focused on the allusion to Greek mythology in the novel's title, I would read the title in a more colloquial manner. Nazi Germany was filled with well-meaning people who were completely lacking in moral courage and were just following orders. Dr. Aue was an order-follower, although he certainly exercised freedom of thought outside of his duties as a Nazi officer. The world is filled with well-meaning people who follow orders who overlook things as they carry out their jobs. In Nazi Germany, the consequences of such behavior were horrific. In today's world, the consequences of such conduct may not be horrific, but they are not to be brushed aside as inconsequential. Failure to speak truth to power, in whatever historical context, constitutes complicity with whatever form of evil is currently ascendant in a society. In modern Western societies, that evil most recently consisted of a form of economic capitalism that awarded speculation over production to an extent that rotted away the solid underpinnings of economic growth and opportunity for the disenfranchised. While this may not be as morally reprehensible as genocide, it remains morally reprehensible nonetheless. And those who kept their mouths shut and simply participated in the process are as culpable in the context of their time as Dr. Aue was guilty in his. One of the most searing features of Mr. Littell's book is the portrayal of the toll that the commission of genocide exacted on the Nazi soldiers who were charged with carrying out the actual acts of torture and murder. In one way or another, this behavior dehumanized them. To a lesser but no less tragic extent, participation in a corrupt capitalism warped the values and beliefs of many of the individuals in positions of power - CEOs, regulators, politicians, money managers, etc. It is a rare individual who can resist being influenced and changed by the madness of the crowds that surround him, yet it is those rare individuals crying out against the mob that are the voices that need to be heard the most. It is not that the road to hell is built with good intentions or bad intentions - that road is built with human intentions. Mr. Littell's masterpiece depicts those intentions in all of their terrible beauty and sounds a message for all men in all times. The Kindly Ones should be required reading in all high schools and colleges in this country despite its sexually graphic and violent subject matter. This is the world that we live in and those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it. (This is an excerpt from an upcoming issue of The HCM Market Letter.)

"The Kindly Ones" is a difficult novel to review for other potential readers. If you scan the editorial comment on this book, you find a baffling range of opinion from "great" to "awful." Such diversity of opinion is usually the mark of a strong work and for that reason alone, it should interest readers of serious fiction. However, the novel is both "great" and "awful" at once, so any reader will pay a price for staying with the 1,000 page narrative.

The great part of "The Kindly Ones" is the phenomenal imagination of the writer, Jonathan Littell. His mind pours out ideas and images with the speed and scope of Cervantes in "Don Quixote" and stagger the reader with the sheer imaginative space of the novel. Further, Littell attempts to tell a big story much like Tolstoy in "War and Peace" and that's unusual for modern fiction. Finally, Littell is clearly trying to stake out an artistic position on a moral issue, the Nazi extermination program, that has tested literary imagination since 1945. This is a serious novel in imagination.

However, in execution the novel is clumsy and flawed. While the book is long, length is no problem until Littell gets to the "end" of the book, and he begins to cram the story to finish it. In other words, the book would probably have completed itself more fully had it been even longer. The last chapter is simply too brief, crowded, and undeveloped for all the imaginative threads Littell had constructed in the prior 900 plus pages. It closes in a rapid and pat fashion like the ending of an Indiana Jones movie. Thus, the novel starts like literature, but ends like pulp fiction.

As reviewers have noted, the content of the book is violent, deviant, disgusting, immoral, crazed - it is the second, seventh, eighth, and ninth circles of Hell. The narrator, Max Aue, is a high functioning human who loves his twin sister like Romeo loves Juilet, but still enjoys random homosexual encounters with the rough trade, and will kill those closest to him when he goes into a fugue state. He appreciates Bach while saving room for Rameau, understands the difference between cabernet and pinot, and reads and speaks Greek. That Littell avoids camp or parody with such a character is a major accomplishment - think of Mel Brooks and "The Producers." And, if this doesn't bother you, then there's the little thing of the Final Solution and the detailed encounters Aue narrates about his participation in the planning and execution of that moral atrocity. Would you prefer the 1923 Haut-Brion with that . . . or the 1921 which everyone knows was the better year?

Through the first two thirds of this book I thought it was one of the best novels I'd ever read in my long life of reading: Imaginative, bold, elaborated, weird, unique, just plain strong. But, the close of the book is so weak that the contrast is most disruptive. It is almost a parody or unconscious theft of Proust, Hugo, Flaubert, and other 19th century European novelists.

Finally, I would recommend this book to readers of serious fiction. This is an interesting, challenging, and flawed novel.

The English version of the Kindly Ones has met with the reception one would have expected from reading the Spanish one which came out last year. Reviewers have complained about Littell not wearing his learning at all lightly and it is true he seems to be part of the "everything and the kitchen sink" school of fiction. But they have also praised the impressive portrayal of the Russian campaign, of the encirclement at Stalingrad, of the nuts and bolts of the concentration camp economy and the conflicts between production (Speer and the Army) and racial annihilation (the SS and particularly Eichmann). The narration of the final thrust against Berlin is mostly well achieved and the cameos from everyone worth knowing in the Third Reich, from Hitler to Speer, from Junger to Himmler, from Eichmann to Höss, are hugely enjoyable even if a bit Zelig-esque. On the other hand, anglophone reviewers have mostly not enjoyed the description, in meticulous detail, of the "hero"'s repulsive sexual preferences, his multiple murders and his odious worldview (at no point does a character, or even the narrator himself, show the obvious inconsistencies at the heart of the Nazi worldview, all the arguments happen within the Nazi mindset- this is a novelty, but not a refreshing one).

I find that the main weakness in the book (besides its prolixity and its determination to shock readers with reiterated and rather pointless depictions of perverted sex and disagreeable references to Aue's digestive tract) is that (in spite to repeated contrary claims) it fails in convincing that the protagonist is just like the reader and that, in similar circumstances he might have done the same. Aue really is a sick freak rather than a normal man driven to excess. While a story based on such a character will be colorful (if not necessarily tasteful), it will also be of limited use in elucidating the stories of millions of rather more average Fritzes and Heinzes that perpetrated the Holocaust along with plenty of Pietros, Jacques and Theuns.

The sheer magnitude of the task and the immense erudition that the author displays in this book have led some French critics to hail this as a great novel and even (and this is just courting Nemesis) to depict it as WWII's War and Peace. I don't think this is the case. A 900+ page novel in which the "hero" doesn't change or evolve, where he doesn't seem to learn from his actions, where he does not develop strong attachments of any sort, where he moves across vast landscapes and meets dozens of major and minor characters but where few develop to a point where they are memorable (there are a few exceptions: a linguist whose expertise in languages is used to determine the racial origins of peoples, a demolition man who suffers because he would have preferred to build rather than destroy, but they are few and far between), is in my view a flawed enterprise. It is a magnificent endeavor, but it doesn't really satisfy the reader (or this reader, at any rate). I'm sorry to say so, but the book seems to me like one of the musical executions of classical composers by SS-men to which Aue repeatedly refers: technically profficient, but soulless.

Also, as the story progresses it becomes less and less believable, even farcical. This is not to say that the most of the book is unenjoyable. For the first five chapters I found it hard to put down, I was spellbound. The sixth chapter (Air) I thought was vile, and the last one quite unsatisfactory. Granted, I am a rather prim reader and I am convinced that it is possible to write a great novel without referring in detail to the characters' backsides. Although there is an honorable literary tradition that alludes to faeces, from Gargantua and Pantagruel to Dom Quixote to Tristran Shandy and Gulliver's Travels, in those books faeces and butts are attributes of the characters rather than characters in themselves.

In the last two chapters of The Kindly Ones, I soldiered on and was glad to be done with it. Like other long novels (and Nazi Germany), this one went out with a whimper rather than a bang.

The great novel about War World II remains to be written (it's not Grossman's Life and Fate, although it is much more readable than the Kindly Ones).

A lot of people found "The Kindly Ones" very hard to take, and I can certainly understand where they are coming from. It's difficult to be trapped in the mind of a Nazi killer for a thousand pages. But I thought it was very nearly a masterpiece, although one that should be approached with care. For one thing we need to remember, although the narrator, former SS officer Max Aue, constantly proclaims his lack of remorse and his kinship with fellow "human brothers", he is an unreliable narrator who is more than a little insane. Although he says he regrets nothing, a sense of horror and guilt seeps from every page. Aue is an evil man, albeit one who is intelligent, insightful and possesses a sort of twisted integrity. Throughout the book he almost comes to terms with his role in the appalling events in which he took part; almost. He remains stuck in the morass of fascist ideology, and the spectacle of a man at war with his own decent instincts is what provides the novel's fascination.

On the level of historical fiction this book is flawless. Aue becomes a sort of Forrest Gump of the Final Solution, turning up in the right places and meeting the most important perpetrators. I've never read a more realistic and thoroughgoing account of the German side of World War II. Littell takes his Nazis seriously. They aren't straw men, but thinking human beings (who think themselves to the wrong conclusions.) You get a sense of the tremendous pressure of Nazi beliefs on the decision-making of these men and how it leads them away from pragmatism into unfathomable evil. The intellectual officer Otto Ohlendorf is seen by Aue as some sort of major theoretician of National Socialism; but he was also a commander of the Einsatzgruppen, responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews in Russia. On this level, "The Kindly Ones" is very similar to Mark Mazower's major history Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. The books share overlapping stories and characters, so much so that Littell's book could be regarded as the fictional transcription of the same terrible facts. Many readers objected to the sheer grossness of Littell's descriptions of the atrocities Aue witnesses. But, of course, these descriptions can't even come close to the monstrous reality. And maybe Littell needs to rub our noses it it, as it were, so we can get the whole unvarnished picture. Stanley Kubrick once said that it would be impossible to make an accurate movie about the Holocaust; the reality was just too terrible to be depicted. Littell does his best in words to do what Kubrick thought was impossible.

A more troubling part of the novel is the "mythic" element, in which Aue lives out literally the Greek myth of Orestes. This portion of the novel seems forced to me. But if you look at it as the delusions of a disturbed mind trying to come to grips with a highly disturbing reality it makes more sense. Another, more provocative theory relates to the head injury Aue gets at Stalingrad. The mythic elements of the story become more frequent and phantasmal after Stalingrad. Maybe this is the result of brain injury; or maybe Aue really does develop a third eye, like Stephen King's Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone (Signet) which allows him to see deeply into the nature of the things around him. And the things that he sees drive him mad by the end of the novel. In any case, you will have to make up your own mind about this part of the book. The above theories make it work for me.

These days, for various reasons, it's hard for me to actually finish a book. "The Kindly Ones" kept me riveted from start to finish, and that is the highest praise I can give it.

Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes" is not a nice book and its main character Maximilian Aue is not a pleasant main character, but he is an honest one at least. My bookseller was so appalled by the contents of this book that she could not finish it, I don't think it's that bad, but not being a visual person may be an advantage.

Aue writes this book as his memoirs and he reminisces about what happened during WWII and the role he played in it as an officer of the SS. He doesn't really see himself or his side as at fault or really immoral in light of the imperative of the time they were living in. His views are best summarized by this platitude he gives: `War is the situation where not only men are killed but also where men are forced to kill.'

In the first parts of the book the massacres perpetrated by the Germans during the Eastern campaign are described. The book quite effectively describes the dilemmas and motivations of the killers and the horror of the massacres. Before reading this book I'd half considered how awful it must be to be the victim of a massacre, but I had never seriously considered the difficulties, psychological, physical and logistical that the butchers go through.

The reason Aue gives why his actions are excusable is the fact that they would have been on the right side of history if only they had won. The victors can write the moral legend of the time however they see fit. Stalin himself killed millions but was one of the Allies until after the victory he became the new enemy.

Also how do you explain to normal people that what is right one day is wrong the next? Some people just did what they had to do to do their job and make a career. If they hadn't done it, anybody else would have done the same thing in their place. If you want to indict the actors, you may as well indict the entire populace.

The moral conundrums that Aue poses have some merit and serve to relativize and rationalize the side of the perpetrators. This may seem morally abject, but the book tries to show that it is extremely limiting to view the most heinous event in recent history from a morally absolute view. The events that lead to ethnic cleansing continue and our willingness to act seems to have only decreased.