A review by sistermagpie
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

2.0

So that was a lot. I went into this book thinking the idea was to show how an ordinary person became a monster as a Nazi, so I was surprised that the main character really seemed to be bizarre from the start. It would almost have been more interesting if the story had just been about discovering his incestuous obsession with his sister and murder of his mother and stepfather while also being drawn to Nazi ideology, but instead there's that plus the holocaust and other horrors of WWII. So he's surrounded by ugliness both internally and externally--which leads to a lot of shit. I mean, literally. There's a lot of diarrhea in this book. When the narrator isn't experiencing it or coming across it in others, he's dreaming about it.

It's a lot.

Weirdly, the parts I found myself most interested in were times when the narrator would fall into some conversation about different racist theories. The theories were obviously false, but it was interesting listening to people expound on them to justify themselves or oversimplify the situation in WWII.