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embi's review against another edition
4.0
This is a really hard book to rate. I'm not sure about 4*s, but it seems to need more than 3.
nzagalo's review against another edition
I've attempted to start reading ‘The Kindly Ones’ several times over the years, but without success. This time, I was more determined, driven by Delphine de Vigan's ideas about fiction and truth. I managed to force myself through the first 100 pages, but then I became bored. I struggled through 200 pages, 300 pages, and finally gave up at 350 pages.
The initial premise of following the psychological interior of an SS officer during World War II intrigued me. Littell creates a realistic work, but he spends a long time describing seemingly trivial details. We follow the SS officer almost in real time, everything he does, all the people he talks to, his questions, doubts, and discomforts, but most notably, his enormous indifference to everything. While initially this indifference made it easier for me to visualize the Nazi crimes, making the graphic violence more emotionally neutral, gradually this indifference began to taint everything, rendering everything meaningless.
Littell uses the character of Maximilien Aue as a human window into the historical reality that has taken place, but in doing so, he not only makes the mistake of making him indifferent, even if the qualities of psychopathy sustain him. Aue's indifference is continually permeated by complaints, which, like it or not, end up making him human in our eyes, sometimes even generating empathy on our side. And that's problematic, almost criminal.
It's remarkable that the book, written by an American who studied in France and wrote in French, was received as a masterpiece in that country, even winning the Goncourt that year. However, abroad, particularly in Germany, England, and the USA, the book has been vilified and labelled with expressions such as ‘pornographic’, ‘disgusting’, ‘sensationalist’, or ‘repellent’.
If you enjoyed Ellis's 'American Psycho', you might find ‘The Kindly Ones’ worth investing a few weeks of your life into, unlike me.
Published in https://narrativax.blogspot.com/2024/10/empathetic-violence.html
The initial premise of following the psychological interior of an SS officer during World War II intrigued me. Littell creates a realistic work, but he spends a long time describing seemingly trivial details. We follow the SS officer almost in real time, everything he does, all the people he talks to, his questions, doubts, and discomforts, but most notably, his enormous indifference to everything. While initially this indifference made it easier for me to visualize the Nazi crimes, making the graphic violence more emotionally neutral, gradually this indifference began to taint everything, rendering everything meaningless.
Littell uses the character of Maximilien Aue as a human window into the historical reality that has taken place, but in doing so, he not only makes the mistake of making him indifferent, even if the qualities of psychopathy sustain him. Aue's indifference is continually permeated by complaints, which, like it or not, end up making him human in our eyes, sometimes even generating empathy on our side. And that's problematic, almost criminal.
It's remarkable that the book, written by an American who studied in France and wrote in French, was received as a masterpiece in that country, even winning the Goncourt that year. However, abroad, particularly in Germany, England, and the USA, the book has been vilified and labelled with expressions such as ‘pornographic’, ‘disgusting’, ‘sensationalist’, or ‘repellent’.
If you enjoyed Ellis's 'American Psycho', you might find ‘The Kindly Ones’ worth investing a few weeks of your life into, unlike me.
Published in https://narrativax.blogspot.com/2024/10/empathetic-violence.html
lievenvg's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
bratbud's review against another edition
3.0
Wreście to skończyłem.
Za łatwo autor oddaje przerażającą osobowość szponom szaleństwa. Szaleńcy robią szalone rzeczy, no więc holokaust jako wytwór szaleństwa...
Gigantyczna ilość dokumentacji, ale w zasadzie co z tego, skoro na dobrą sprawę ostatnie 150 stron kładzie całą książkę. O ileż bardziej byłaby ona przerażające gdyby Aue nie został szaleństwem usprawiedliwiony?
Za łatwo autor oddaje przerażającą osobowość szponom szaleństwa. Szaleńcy robią szalone rzeczy, no więc holokaust jako wytwór szaleństwa...
Gigantyczna ilość dokumentacji, ale w zasadzie co z tego, skoro na dobrą sprawę ostatnie 150 stron kładzie całą książkę. O ileż bardziej byłaby ona przerażające gdyby Aue nie został szaleństwem usprawiedliwiony?
dataphyte's review against another edition
4.0
The author is apparently a reader of Sade and Bataille, authors I've picked up but mostly put down after a few pages. Perhaps if I had read more of those authors I would not feel as I do now having finished The Kindly Ones: fascinated, horrified, and robbed of an innocence I didn't know I had to loose. Probably not though.
If you find that you can appreciate "The Story of the Eye", then I suppose that I can recommend this book to you highly.
If you find that you can appreciate "The Story of the Eye", then I suppose that I can recommend this book to you highly.
bennyandthejets420's review against another edition
4.5
I should probably write some thoughts about this book at some point. I had big ambitions for writing a review summary of this, but life had other plans, and the book sat somewhere in my brain like a lump of undigested darkness.
I didn't really tell many people I was reading this, which was funny just because I can definitely see it's been one of my more absorbing reading experiences of late, but how do you tell someone that the 1000 page intimate confessions of an incestuous, shit-obsessed, fatally romantic Nazi SS officer is "a really good read?"
I think I might just organize this in terms of what works and what doesn't work.
What Works (or what I liked about it)
Before I decided to read this, I was thinking about how in some of my most formative reading experiences, I was actively unsure about what I was reading about most of the time. Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses---what I really liked about those books was the feeling of being thrown into really deep water and just barely being able to keep your head above the surface. Having revisited them (except, actually Ulysses which I should really reread), I pretty much understand 90% of what's going on now. But before, I enjoyed being lost, confused, and unable to explain what was going on. In some ways, that made me want to push through the confusion an figure it out. Being lost while reading, I think, is what I missed the most. And The Kindly Ones, with its encyclopedic digressions on SS bureaucratic language, language systems of the Caucuses, and the hackwork of race science, seemed like just the trick.
On that front, I think, The Kindly Ones delivers. Littel's erudition (the rumored 200 books and primary source materials he gathered for this) really shines through, and, if you're like me, you don't mind characters delivering long, meticulous speeches about topics that interest them, you'll find lots to love here. One of the things I always like to read in fiction is when characters say smart things to each other. I don't even mind if those things are "not realistic," as long as they're smart. Of course, for this to work, the author also has to be smart, or at least have read a lot, and I think the occasionally seam-showing on part of the erudition of the narrator and the other characters doesn't detract from the sheer encyclopedic knowledge on display. Maximilien Aue, the narrator, is a voice above all, what Aue calls "a gaze," and I think that's a useful thing to keep in mind. He's been constructed from a lot of parts, and it's because we spend so much time with him, and in such psychologically claustrophobic wall of paragraph style, that we begin to think he's real.
Finally, it should be said, this is an evil book. Not in a sense of morally evil but in the sense of "depicting evil." Littell seems to be most interested in the constructions of logic by which the evil of the Holocaust could have been perpetuated and, oh boy, do we get them. From justifications of total war, to racialized science, to the euphemisms employed, to the need to make the genocide more depersonalized in order for it to be accomplished--it's all there and meticulously detailed.
What maybe doesn't work (or what I'm unsure about)
Yeah so Max Aue is also an incestuous, shit-obsessed parricide. He's also a homosexual, but it's because he want to identify with his long lost sister. So he has gay sex and pretends he is his sister. Which I meeeeean. Okay, so many people have I think rightly pointed out that Littell "should have" made him more normal. Because in making him this deviant, he risks undermining the opening gambit wherein Max insists that he's "just like you," the narrator. But I think we're not under any obligation to believe that opening gambit. And, if anything, Max's neurosis speak to a psyche that is fundamentally underdeveloped. He hasn't moved on from the past. He's constantly seeking limit experiences which never come and which lead him to, in a move I believe designed to make us identical to him, seek job positions that place him in direct interaction with the genocide occurring. He hasn't grown up. He should have learned how to play the piano. His voice is of the bitter, failed romantic, unwilling to take responsibility for his actions (sometimes to an insane degree, as he unconciously forgets that he murders his mother and step father in order make himself feel better about being wounded at the Battle of Stalingrad: grisly stuff!!)
That I think is the thing I'm still not sure about. It's not so much that we (the normal person) are made to identify with Max (the incestuous, shit-obsessed parricide). It's that we are meant to have the same feelings as he does: wary of the genocides about to occur, wanting to see what happens next (even if we morally condemn it), wanting to have a limit experience by which our notions of self are dissolved. It's in that technique that Littell positions us with the narrator. It's an affective identification rather than a categorical one. Is that tasteless, puerile, voyeuristic? I'm not sure. The only thing I can really come down on is that it's audacious. The result is that The Kindly Ones is an unholy combination of transgressive literature with the encyclopedic novel and the historical novel. It's certainly the most abject, disgusting, and observing historical novel I've ever read.
Some final, stray thoughts
Really glad I read this, even If I agree it's somewhat of a mess. When Max goes to Hungary and gets involved with the bureaucratic nightmare there, the book takes a seemingly stuffed, cramped, and endless style there. The portrait of Eichmann is fascinating and seems in heavy conversation with Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem which I have yet to read. Max's psyche is also highly dependent on Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies which I also have yet to read. I also highly appreciated the diversions into adventure literature (Max's hallucination via a wound in Stalingrad), the fatalism of the Stalingrad encounter, and the weird, practically Columbo style detectives who show up in the end as a kind of personification of the Fates. Which, by the way, have I mentioned the Greek myth layering to this thing? That's also another aspect which I think doesn't quite work, even if the strange stylistic detours do a lot to keep interest up through the length and page long paragraphs. Ultimately, I really enjoyed reading this, almost to an uncomfortable degree lol even if I have trouble agreeing that it's a masterpiece. The closest comparison I can come up with is with The Tunnel but Littel's prose is much more workmanlike and if Gass was trying to make the fascism that lurks in even heart sound seductive, Littell just locks us in the room with it.
I didn't really tell many people I was reading this, which was funny just because I can definitely see it's been one of my more absorbing reading experiences of late, but how do you tell someone that the 1000 page intimate confessions of an incestuous, shit-obsessed, fatally romantic Nazi SS officer is "a really good read?"
I think I might just organize this in terms of what works and what doesn't work.
What Works (or what I liked about it)
Before I decided to read this, I was thinking about how in some of my most formative reading experiences, I was actively unsure about what I was reading about most of the time. Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses---what I really liked about those books was the feeling of being thrown into really deep water and just barely being able to keep your head above the surface. Having revisited them (except, actually Ulysses which I should really reread), I pretty much understand 90% of what's going on now. But before, I enjoyed being lost, confused, and unable to explain what was going on. In some ways, that made me want to push through the confusion an figure it out. Being lost while reading, I think, is what I missed the most. And The Kindly Ones, with its encyclopedic digressions on SS bureaucratic language, language systems of the Caucuses, and the hackwork of race science, seemed like just the trick.
On that front, I think, The Kindly Ones delivers. Littel's erudition (the rumored 200 books and primary source materials he gathered for this) really shines through, and, if you're like me, you don't mind characters delivering long, meticulous speeches about topics that interest them, you'll find lots to love here. One of the things I always like to read in fiction is when characters say smart things to each other. I don't even mind if those things are "not realistic," as long as they're smart. Of course, for this to work, the author also has to be smart, or at least have read a lot, and I think the occasionally seam-showing on part of the erudition of the narrator and the other characters doesn't detract from the sheer encyclopedic knowledge on display. Maximilien Aue, the narrator, is a voice above all, what Aue calls "a gaze," and I think that's a useful thing to keep in mind. He's been constructed from a lot of parts, and it's because we spend so much time with him, and in such psychologically claustrophobic wall of paragraph style, that we begin to think he's real.
Finally, it should be said, this is an evil book. Not in a sense of morally evil but in the sense of "depicting evil." Littell seems to be most interested in the constructions of logic by which the evil of the Holocaust could have been perpetuated and, oh boy, do we get them. From justifications of total war, to racialized science, to the euphemisms employed, to the need to make the genocide more depersonalized in order for it to be accomplished--it's all there and meticulously detailed.
What maybe doesn't work (or what I'm unsure about)
Yeah so Max Aue is also an incestuous, shit-obsessed parricide. He's also a homosexual, but it's because he want to identify with his long lost sister. So he has gay sex and pretends he is his sister. Which I meeeeean. Okay, so many people have I think rightly pointed out that Littell "should have" made him more normal. Because in making him this deviant, he risks undermining the opening gambit wherein Max insists that he's "just like you," the narrator. But I think we're not under any obligation to believe that opening gambit. And, if anything, Max's neurosis speak to a psyche that is fundamentally underdeveloped. He hasn't moved on from the past. He's constantly seeking limit experiences which never come and which lead him to, in a move I believe designed to make us identical to him, seek job positions that place him in direct interaction with the genocide occurring. He hasn't grown up. He should have learned how to play the piano. His voice is of the bitter, failed romantic, unwilling to take responsibility for his actions (sometimes to an insane degree, as he unconciously forgets that he murders his mother and step father in order make himself feel better about being wounded at the Battle of Stalingrad: grisly stuff!!)
That I think is the thing I'm still not sure about. It's not so much that we (the normal person) are made to identify with Max (the incestuous, shit-obsessed parricide). It's that we are meant to have the same feelings as he does: wary of the genocides about to occur, wanting to see what happens next (even if we morally condemn it), wanting to have a limit experience by which our notions of self are dissolved. It's in that technique that Littell positions us with the narrator. It's an affective identification rather than a categorical one. Is that tasteless, puerile, voyeuristic? I'm not sure. The only thing I can really come down on is that it's audacious. The result is that The Kindly Ones is an unholy combination of transgressive literature with the encyclopedic novel and the historical novel. It's certainly the most abject, disgusting, and observing historical novel I've ever read.
Some final, stray thoughts
Really glad I read this, even If I agree it's somewhat of a mess. When Max goes to Hungary and gets involved with the bureaucratic nightmare there, the book takes a seemingly stuffed, cramped, and endless style there. The portrait of Eichmann is fascinating and seems in heavy conversation with Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem which I have yet to read. Max's psyche is also highly dependent on Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies which I also have yet to read. I also highly appreciated the diversions into adventure literature (Max's hallucination via a wound in Stalingrad), the fatalism of the Stalingrad encounter, and the weird, practically Columbo style detectives who show up in the end as a kind of personification of the Fates. Which, by the way, have I mentioned the Greek myth layering to this thing? That's also another aspect which I think doesn't quite work, even if the strange stylistic detours do a lot to keep interest up through the length and page long paragraphs. Ultimately, I really enjoyed reading this, almost to an uncomfortable degree lol even if I have trouble agreeing that it's a masterpiece. The closest comparison I can come up with is with The Tunnel but Littel's prose is much more workmanlike and if Gass was trying to make the fascism that lurks in even heart sound seductive, Littell just locks us in the room with it.
triplecitrus's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Very conflicted on how to rate this. I feel haunted by this book.
It was an amazing, captivating, awful read. At times I couldn't put it down and at times I wished that I could. If you enjoyed Cormac McCarthy's "Child of God" this might be a good choice for you due to the subject matter and innate unfriendliness of the text.
I would not recommend this book to anyone I know.
It was an amazing, captivating, awful read. At times I couldn't put it down and at times I wished that I could. If you enjoyed Cormac McCarthy's "Child of God" this might be a good choice for you due to the subject matter and innate unfriendliness of the text.
I would not recommend this book to anyone I know.
fionnualalirsdottir's review against another edition
Assigning a star rating to this book is impossible. I can see why it was necessary for it to be written - to remind us of what we are capable - but that doesn't make this book readable. Personally, I couldn't get beyond page 120 or thereabouts. My difficulty lay in reconciling the chilling, dispassionate voice of the narrator with the brutal and horrifying scenes he was witnessing. I became paralysed by the awful, stomach churning fear of what he would recount next. I have never experienced such a feeling from a book. I had no choice but to abandon it.
marc129's review against another edition
2.0
There is so much I could say about this book. First of all, it is simply impressive how much information Littell has collected on World War II and especially on the internal kitchen of Hitler Germany; I recognized a lot of what I had read in Ian Kershaw’s books (especially his Hitler biography): the ongoing internal competition between the various power centers of the Reich, the increasing anarchy, and especially the mechanism of "Dem Führer entgegen arbeiten". Of course, I cannot judge whether Littell's fictional exposition on Nazism is completely correct, but he certainly succeeded in illustrating what the internal coherence of Nazism was and how the war horrors “logically” derived from that coherence. Of course I know that this is a very controversial proposition, because many war criminals used it to try to diminish their personal responsibility.
And that's exactly what the main character and narrator, Dr. Max Aue, a prominent member of the SS, is doing in this book. Regularly Aue states that all the main players of Nazi-Germany in fact were ordinary people like you and me, people that just wanted to play their role in a "Weltanschauung" that for them was logical and natural, and thus that they were not the sadistic demons they were represented to be after the war. Of course, since Hannah Arendt we are already aware of this, but Littell makes Aue also state quite another view: after his frequent contacts with Adolf Eichman, for example, he stresses that Eichman certainly wasn't an ordinary, banal man, but rather a top professional who only wanted to achieve the goal he had been ordered to achieve. This book is full of this kind of perverse ambiguities, constantly putting the reader on the wrong leg. All the time we have to be aware that Aue brings us an apology and thus his story is full of revisionist elements. Handsomely done, surely, but very difficult for the reader.
Many reviews emphasize that the big weakness of this book is the lack of focus. And that's right, because Littell does not seem to be able to choose between an epic-wide evocation of a crucial era (such as Tolstoi in “War and Peace”), a philosophical-ethical reflection on the horrors of a totalitarian state (such as Vasily Grossman in “Life and Fate”), and a psychological portrait of an apparently normal but actually very sick mind (in this case, Dr. Aue). Sometimes Littell/Aue gives 100 pages of detailed information about troop movements or discussions between Nazi bosses, then suddenly a flashback from Aue on his incestuous relationship with his sister, followed by another long-eyed violent horror scene, and so on. Of course, this introspective part (because we obviously have to do with the version that Aue itself gives us) is very interesting, and Littell also explicitly connects it with the theme of the mental health of Nazism. This seems to me a key passage to understand this novel:
"Since my childhood, I was haunted by the passion for the absolute and the transcending of limits; now this passion had led me to the edge of the mass graves of Ukraine. My thought had always been radical; now the State and the Nation also have chosen the radical and the absolute [...]. And if this radicalness was the radicalness of the abyss, and the absolute revealed itself as the absolute evil, then one ought, I firmly thought, to follow them all the way down, with the eyes wide open. “
But, as noted, Littell does not really manage to balance this personal story of psychological perversion with the wider story of the horrors of Nazism. Instead, we get a sequence of sometimes boring, descriptive passages about the war operations, detailed descriptions of war crimes (especially the Babi Yar Massacre near Kiev, Stalingrad's Hell, the terror of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the deadly marches at the end of the war), vivid and sometimes highly philosophical conversations and occasionally also the perversions of Aue himself.
In the last 100 pages of this book the Aue character completely derails: his acts not only become outright shocking (with some pretty graphic scenes), but sometimes also ridiculously hilarious (his encounter with Hitler for example). Perhaps Littell wanted to indicate that we should not take his story too seriously.
No, this novel, although at times very impressive, certainly is not an overall success. Personally, I think that 1400 pages (in my edition) really is too much. If you really want to read an extended book about war and dictatorship, I would certainly recommend the 1.000 pages of Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate". (2.5 stars)
And that's exactly what the main character and narrator, Dr. Max Aue, a prominent member of the SS, is doing in this book. Regularly Aue states that all the main players of Nazi-Germany in fact were ordinary people like you and me, people that just wanted to play their role in a "Weltanschauung" that for them was logical and natural, and thus that they were not the sadistic demons they were represented to be after the war. Of course, since Hannah Arendt we are already aware of this, but Littell makes Aue also state quite another view: after his frequent contacts with Adolf Eichman, for example, he stresses that Eichman certainly wasn't an ordinary, banal man, but rather a top professional who only wanted to achieve the goal he had been ordered to achieve. This book is full of this kind of perverse ambiguities, constantly putting the reader on the wrong leg. All the time we have to be aware that Aue brings us an apology and thus his story is full of revisionist elements. Handsomely done, surely, but very difficult for the reader.
Many reviews emphasize that the big weakness of this book is the lack of focus. And that's right, because Littell does not seem to be able to choose between an epic-wide evocation of a crucial era (such as Tolstoi in “War and Peace”), a philosophical-ethical reflection on the horrors of a totalitarian state (such as Vasily Grossman in “Life and Fate”), and a psychological portrait of an apparently normal but actually very sick mind (in this case, Dr. Aue). Sometimes Littell/Aue gives 100 pages of detailed information about troop movements or discussions between Nazi bosses, then suddenly a flashback from Aue on his incestuous relationship with his sister, followed by another long-eyed violent horror scene, and so on. Of course, this introspective part (because we obviously have to do with the version that Aue itself gives us) is very interesting, and Littell also explicitly connects it with the theme of the mental health of Nazism. This seems to me a key passage to understand this novel:
"Since my childhood, I was haunted by the passion for the absolute and the transcending of limits; now this passion had led me to the edge of the mass graves of Ukraine. My thought had always been radical; now the State and the Nation also have chosen the radical and the absolute [...]. And if this radicalness was the radicalness of the abyss, and the absolute revealed itself as the absolute evil, then one ought, I firmly thought, to follow them all the way down, with the eyes wide open. “
But, as noted, Littell does not really manage to balance this personal story of psychological perversion with the wider story of the horrors of Nazism. Instead, we get a sequence of sometimes boring, descriptive passages about the war operations, detailed descriptions of war crimes (especially the Babi Yar Massacre near Kiev, Stalingrad's Hell, the terror of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the deadly marches at the end of the war), vivid and sometimes highly philosophical conversations and occasionally also the perversions of Aue himself.
In the last 100 pages of this book the Aue character completely derails: his acts not only become outright shocking (with some pretty graphic scenes), but sometimes also ridiculously hilarious (his encounter with Hitler for example). Perhaps Littell wanted to indicate that we should not take his story too seriously.
No, this novel, although at times very impressive, certainly is not an overall success. Personally, I think that 1400 pages (in my edition) really is too much. If you really want to read an extended book about war and dictatorship, I would certainly recommend the 1.000 pages of Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate". (2.5 stars)