The Kindly Ones: A Novel Paperback – February 2, 2010

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 isThat to God shall come;I -- love's skein upon the ground,My body in the tomb --Shall leap into the light lostIn 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.

It is rather implausible that an SS officer involved in the Holocaust would write a memoir of his crimes, at least not one that was thoughtful and truthful. So Littell invents one. Unlike most actual German memoirs from WWII, Littell's main character, Max Aue, does not hide behind justifications or equivocations like "We were only following orders" or "Our leaders deceived us." Aue believes in what he is doing as a true believer, a Nazi who trusts Hitler and his plan for Germany and Europe, including the extermination of Jews, communists and other "enemies" of the German people. Yet Aue is not presented as some rabid dog, some unquestioning monster. He is intelligent, and as he participates in the slaughter, he searches for answers to his doubts and instinctual revulsion at the mass murder he is involved in. Of course, Aue is not a sympathetic character, one we are meant to have compassion for; when faced with blatant rejections of Nazi methods, he defends their policies as correct and necessary. But through his narration we see how a human being is able to take part in genocide, to grapple with and see through inhuman cruelty to innocent men, women and children. For anyone who has learned about the Holocaust, we inevitably ask, "How could so many people do something so senseless and horrible?" Littell dares to take us inside the mind of such a person.In terms of historicity, the book is clearly the work of meticulous research. Several historical figures, German and French, appear, from Adolf Eichmann to Adolf Hitler. Some of these scenes seem surreal, but make sense as the book descends into madness as the war itself goes from a methodical march of terror to total anarchy.As others have noted, the book is rather transgressive with its descriptions of sex, vomiting and bodily fluids. I was expecting something as graphic as American Psycho but Littell is not quite as gratuitous as that. However, Aue's homosexuality and incestuous feelings also serve no real purpose. It feels more like the cliche of the refined and effeminate villain; a whip held in a velvet glove. Granted, these qualities make Aue more interesting than a bland bureaucrat like Eichmann, but they needlessly add shock value to a book about the most shocking event of the 20th century. The only part of the book that turned my stomach was the Babi Yar massacre.Celebrated in France but virtually unread in the USA, this book is not meant for a mass audience. Not many people want to step inside the head of a mass murderer. Like watching a movie about Hitler's last days in his bunker, we feel no compassion for the people on the screen, and we know how the story ends. But there is something dark and powerful in capturing the psyche behind the perpetuators of the Holocaust, as well as something uplifting that even devoted Nazis, when butchering their victims, could not resist seeing their own family members in the faces of the people they killed. There is a solidarity in humanity that transcends any ideology, no matter how powerful or hateful.

What a read. Magnificent. Drags you into the situation immediately and then after almost 1000 pages you wonder how you will live without Dr Aue to read about. The mos amazing book you will ever read. A psychological and philosophical rollercoaster.

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).

This was a hard book to read for a lot of reasons but a very important one. If you're at all interested in the Second World War from a German high ranking officer's point of view this is book is a must. It's long but fascinating.

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

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