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A review by bennyandthejets420
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
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.