The Kindly Ones Review

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The Kindly Ones ReviewAn 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.
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