The Kindly Ones by Jonathan
Littell is easily one of the hardest books I have ever had to read and that
isn’t such a good thing. It takes up quite a lot of time and is filled to the
brim with esoteric details about German army, historical facts and the mechanisms
about World War II. By the end you are drained, by the intense details the
reader can get bogged down in, as well as the appalling acts our narrator
commits throughout it’s 975 pages. For while this book is a chore to read for
far too many pages, within them lie scenes that are shocking and gruesome, and
are destined to leave a mark long after reading them. It also does the amazing
thing of asking certain questions about morality and culpability about a dark
time in history that many people won’t ask, or are afraid to. Our narrator, a
Dr. Max Aue, is, at the beginning of the novel, living a life as a French
factory owner with a loving family. He soon tells us this is in fact a façade
he has intricately fabricated for himself after the things he did for the
Nazi’s during the war. We learn he is very smart man, knowing a lot about
books, history and philosophy. We also learn, through his many heinous acts,
that he is a brutal, yet rather empty psychopath whose tendencies were brought
forth out of him by the kinds of atrocities that the Nazi’s perpetrated. The
main problem with this book is how long it is. Littell rarely leaves any
details out, and the narrative gets lost in the long shuffle through many
unindented lines of prose. But the real treats in the novel deal with the
little scenes of cruelty we witness, from the sad death of a boy piano prodigy,
to the disgusting thing he does with a sausage in a refrigerator in one of his
flashbacks. And it asks questions about what kind of punishment he should have
received. Was he psychopath, or did this world without conscious or love simply
make him a harmful monster instead of a harmless one? If you can get through (some
won’t), this is a very thought-provoking novel.
Rating: 4/5
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