The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell was originally published in France in 2006, where it won the country’s most prestigious literary award. It became an international best seller; critics called it everything from the next War and Peace to the next defining novel on the Nazi era.
I picked up my version of The Kindly Ones, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, for reading during Spring Break. The novel was a daunting task, not because of its length — it is close to 1,000 pages — or the endless, boring bureaucratic descriptions of the inner workings of the Nazi regime, but because of the extremely graphic, perverted descriptions of sodomy, mass murder, incest, rape and the main character’s many and frequent bowel movements.
Littell, who was born in the United States and speaks fluent English, decided to write his tour de force in French, although he currently resides in Spain. The task he attempts to accomplish in The Kindly Ones is perhaps an impossible one: to create a novel with the historical detail of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and with the literary influence of Nabokov’s Lolita. Indeed, one can see fingerprints of both authors on Littell’s work.
The Kindly Ones is narrated from the point of view of Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi who currently resides in France as a lace factory owner. He is well-respected and well-read — a Renaissance man who speaks several languages and enjoys classical music. Aue feels compelled to write his autobiography, an intense story that sprawls from his early childhood through his role in Nazi atrocities. Aue helps plan the Final Solution with Nazi bureaucrats, is present at Auschwitz to implement the plan, and eventually meets Adolf Hitler. Throughout it all, Aue insists that he is indeed “a man like you.” One gets the sense that the novel is attempting to prove that “normal” people can commit Nazi atrocities. Nothing in the novel, however, supports that idea. Aue for a few hundred pages talks about his life before the Nazi regime, which he spent having sex with his twin sister, Una, before they were forcibly separated. He sodomizes himself with sausages and sticks. He murders not only his mother and stepfather, whom he hated, but his best friend. Some of the sick atrocities chronicled within this thousand-page monster are undoubtedly unnecessary. Most disturbing, however, are the unrepentant, almost gleeful descriptions of such perverse acts: “It wasn’t so much the gassing that posed a problem, but the ovens were overloaded,” Aue explains passively when describing his work at Auschwitz.
Reviews in the United States have been mixed. Although some reacted favorably, Michiko Kakutani, head reviewer at the New York Times, called it “willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent” and went so far as to comment that the novel’s favorable reception in France is a reflection of the “perversity of French taste.”
The novel doesn’t live up to its hype, but it does have certain merits. The Kindly Ones evoked the strongest of emotions and spawned literary discussion and debate across international borders. While I would not recommend the novel to everyone — it’s much too graphic and perverted in more ways than can be described — it certainly made me think. I, for one, will not be forgetting this novel for a long time.
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