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A review by genre_fiction_is_literature
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
3.0
The Kindly Ones is a haunted house with real ghosts and infinite rooms. Our narrator, a Nazi Forrest Gump, takes us on an intimate journey that transverses nearly every angle of the Holocaust. It's a fascinating achievement that touches on music, language, cuisine, weather, neuroscience, sexuality, philosophy, nutrition, murder and perversions of all flavors. It's sick, heart-wrenching, intelligent but uneven.
Five page paragraphs that need serious trimming are mixed in with superb stretches of painfully effective writing. Military titles and German names blur together but maybe that's part of the point. Every time one freak is moved or killed they are quickly replaced by another. The narrator attempts to demonstrate the futility of disobeying...it was pointless, look so many others are willing.
Try a hundred pages, get thoroughly horrified and ask yourself – am I prepared to wallow in such a dark story for so long? Recommended to those who wished American Psycho was three times longer.
Five page paragraphs that need serious trimming are mixed in with superb stretches of painfully effective writing. Military titles and German names blur together but maybe that's part of the point. Every time one freak is moved or killed they are quickly replaced by another. The narrator attempts to demonstrate the futility of disobeying...it was pointless, look so many others are willing.
Try a hundred pages, get thoroughly horrified and ask yourself – am I prepared to wallow in such a dark story for so long? Recommended to those who wished American Psycho was three times longer.