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A review by gh7
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
2.0
I felt like abandoning this just about every day. At times it irritated me, at others it bored me. My stubborn nature finally won out though and I ploughed through all its 975 pages.
It's always going to be an act of hubris to believe you can explain the Nazis. The Kindly Ones purports to offer an insight into the transformation of an ordinary young man into a Nazi monster. Early on, Max Aue, the narrator, an SS Obersturmbannfürher, makes a case that all of us might have done what the Germans did in their place, that we are mistaken to believe that what the Nazis did was some sort of unique phenomenon confined to Germans in the middle of the 20th century. First off, I'm not sure most of us do believe that. We might not believe the scale of the Nazi death machine could be repeated but racial hatred is still a political factor in modern life. Fervent nationalism, a disenfranchised underclass, an economic crisis and a handy racial scapegoat are the first prerequisites for a fascist state. Many countries are presently vulnerable. There are still plenty of potential Nazis in the world and probably always will be. Nor do I think most of us delude ourselves that we would have actively opposed the Nazis were we living under the terrifying close surveillance of the Gestapo. However, there's a big difference between, for example, turning a blind eye and zealously reporting anyone you don't like to the Gestapo; an even bigger difference between serving as a soldier in the regular army and executing naked women and children by the side of the ditches. The author however tells us all are equally culpable, that there's no difference between a member of the Einsatzgruppen and the railway worker who changed the tracks for the freight cars. With this logic the airline employees who sold the 9/11 terrorists their tickets were no less responsible for the deaths in the twin towers than the terrorists themselves. Of course, the Nazis held to a mantra of collective responsibility so, given our narrator is an unrepentant Nazi, we can perhaps forgive him his trite philosophising.
But seeing as Littell begins with this idea of collective responsibility you assume he will have as his narrator a kind of everyman who will bear his theory out that we are all potential Nazis. Before long though we find out our narrator's pivotal childhood memory is of engaging in anal sex with his twin sister at the age of twelve. I stopped here to ask myself how many people there are currently in the world who have known this experience. I concluded less probably than people born with three eyes. Max Hue is like some twisted adolescent fantasy character conceived after immersing oneself in the complete works of the Marquis De Sade. In fact, twisted sexuality is often a subplot, with the suspicion that the author is implying that Nazism was some kind of symptom of sexual deviation. Max Hue is a closet homosexual; he's also an intellectual and an aesthete. In other words, everything the Nazis loathe. He could hardly be less representative of a typical Nazi. I never once understood why the author chose to make his narrator so preposterously unbelievable. Probably the one thing he did do well for me was to delve into the dissociative ingenuity of the human brain. But dissociative identity disorder was an inevitable consequence of Nazi barbarity rather than, as Littell implies, its cause.
I could have got past this misgiving about the foundations of his central reasoning if the novel hadn't very quickly showed innumerable sins of crude artistry. Strip this book of its reportage, its non-fiction and what remains is a framework of gothic kitsch. A man as a child engages in anal sex with his twin sister, idolises his father for no apparent reason, later murders his mother and stepfather, is pursued throughout the war by a couple of preposterous Keystone cops who are still intent on bringing him to justice when the Russians are advancing down a neighbouring Berlin street. It's often like bad slapstick comedy which Littell perhaps acknowledges when, towards the end, his narrator takes a fervent dislike to Hitler's physiognomy and instead of accepting the medal from his führer sinks his teeth into Adolf's nose and then speculates why history has remained unaware of this event.
A whole section is devoted to Aue's sexual fantasies. In a novel of nearly a thousand pages the last thing we need is an endless repetitive cataloguing of all the ways Aue comes up with to desecrate his sister's home. He made his point and then went on making it for forty odd pages. Then there's the dialogue. The dialogue is consistently bad. Even straightforward exchanges are heavy-handed and bereft of fluidity. Often a character is drafted in with an encyclopaedic knowledge of a section's pertinent subject which allows Littell to write long unbroken treatises in the form of thoroughly unconvincing dialogue. There's the feeling the author wants to cram in absolutely everything he's read about the war. The most impressive thing about it for me was the quantity of research that went into its construction. But this is also one of its problems because with its endless lists of SS officials and departments it often reads like a non-fiction book with a kind of Forest Gump narrator who always manages to gatecrash every pivotal moment of Nazi history. There's little artistry in the way the research is fed into the novel. He's there at the Babi Yar massacres, he turns up at Auschwitz and, of course, he finally makes it to the Hitler bunker. Also, I often found its voyeurism more disturbing than the atrocities themselves. He's been accused of being a pornographer of violence and I'd agree with that and add to it, a pornographer of bodily functions.
Another massive problem is the punctuation. I don't think I've ever read a book with such shoddy punctuation. Paragraphs continue on for pages with little rhyme or reason. Sometimes sentences too.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself how well did this novel succeed in its intention of providing an insight into the Nazi psyche? I'm afraid I didn't buy into Max Hue at all. At times you might say it's a brilliantly researched book of non-fiction; every time however the fiction in it asserts itself I kept feeling Littell is a long way from being a first rate novelist.
It's always going to be an act of hubris to believe you can explain the Nazis. The Kindly Ones purports to offer an insight into the transformation of an ordinary young man into a Nazi monster. Early on, Max Aue, the narrator, an SS Obersturmbannfürher, makes a case that all of us might have done what the Germans did in their place, that we are mistaken to believe that what the Nazis did was some sort of unique phenomenon confined to Germans in the middle of the 20th century. First off, I'm not sure most of us do believe that. We might not believe the scale of the Nazi death machine could be repeated but racial hatred is still a political factor in modern life. Fervent nationalism, a disenfranchised underclass, an economic crisis and a handy racial scapegoat are the first prerequisites for a fascist state. Many countries are presently vulnerable. There are still plenty of potential Nazis in the world and probably always will be. Nor do I think most of us delude ourselves that we would have actively opposed the Nazis were we living under the terrifying close surveillance of the Gestapo. However, there's a big difference between, for example, turning a blind eye and zealously reporting anyone you don't like to the Gestapo; an even bigger difference between serving as a soldier in the regular army and executing naked women and children by the side of the ditches. The author however tells us all are equally culpable, that there's no difference between a member of the Einsatzgruppen and the railway worker who changed the tracks for the freight cars. With this logic the airline employees who sold the 9/11 terrorists their tickets were no less responsible for the deaths in the twin towers than the terrorists themselves. Of course, the Nazis held to a mantra of collective responsibility so, given our narrator is an unrepentant Nazi, we can perhaps forgive him his trite philosophising.
But seeing as Littell begins with this idea of collective responsibility you assume he will have as his narrator a kind of everyman who will bear his theory out that we are all potential Nazis. Before long though we find out our narrator's pivotal childhood memory is of engaging in anal sex with his twin sister at the age of twelve. I stopped here to ask myself how many people there are currently in the world who have known this experience. I concluded less probably than people born with three eyes. Max Hue is like some twisted adolescent fantasy character conceived after immersing oneself in the complete works of the Marquis De Sade. In fact, twisted sexuality is often a subplot, with the suspicion that the author is implying that Nazism was some kind of symptom of sexual deviation. Max Hue is a closet homosexual; he's also an intellectual and an aesthete. In other words, everything the Nazis loathe. He could hardly be less representative of a typical Nazi. I never once understood why the author chose to make his narrator so preposterously unbelievable. Probably the one thing he did do well for me was to delve into the dissociative ingenuity of the human brain. But dissociative identity disorder was an inevitable consequence of Nazi barbarity rather than, as Littell implies, its cause.
I could have got past this misgiving about the foundations of his central reasoning if the novel hadn't very quickly showed innumerable sins of crude artistry. Strip this book of its reportage, its non-fiction and what remains is a framework of gothic kitsch. A man as a child engages in anal sex with his twin sister, idolises his father for no apparent reason, later murders his mother and stepfather, is pursued throughout the war by a couple of preposterous Keystone cops who are still intent on bringing him to justice when the Russians are advancing down a neighbouring Berlin street. It's often like bad slapstick comedy which Littell perhaps acknowledges when, towards the end, his narrator takes a fervent dislike to Hitler's physiognomy and instead of accepting the medal from his führer sinks his teeth into Adolf's nose and then speculates why history has remained unaware of this event.
A whole section is devoted to Aue's sexual fantasies. In a novel of nearly a thousand pages the last thing we need is an endless repetitive cataloguing of all the ways Aue comes up with to desecrate his sister's home. He made his point and then went on making it for forty odd pages. Then there's the dialogue. The dialogue is consistently bad. Even straightforward exchanges are heavy-handed and bereft of fluidity. Often a character is drafted in with an encyclopaedic knowledge of a section's pertinent subject which allows Littell to write long unbroken treatises in the form of thoroughly unconvincing dialogue. There's the feeling the author wants to cram in absolutely everything he's read about the war. The most impressive thing about it for me was the quantity of research that went into its construction. But this is also one of its problems because with its endless lists of SS officials and departments it often reads like a non-fiction book with a kind of Forest Gump narrator who always manages to gatecrash every pivotal moment of Nazi history. There's little artistry in the way the research is fed into the novel. He's there at the Babi Yar massacres, he turns up at Auschwitz and, of course, he finally makes it to the Hitler bunker. Also, I often found its voyeurism more disturbing than the atrocities themselves. He's been accused of being a pornographer of violence and I'd agree with that and add to it, a pornographer of bodily functions.
Another massive problem is the punctuation. I don't think I've ever read a book with such shoddy punctuation. Paragraphs continue on for pages with little rhyme or reason. Sometimes sentences too.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself how well did this novel succeed in its intention of providing an insight into the Nazi psyche? I'm afraid I didn't buy into Max Hue at all. At times you might say it's a brilliantly researched book of non-fiction; every time however the fiction in it asserts itself I kept feeling Littell is a long way from being a first rate novelist.