The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

This novel is one more reminder that different cultures, and even different nations with somewhat similar cultures, see things differently. It was awarded two of the top literary prizes in France and was a best seller. It was also well received in England, called by some critics the War and Peace of the Second World War. And yet, it has not done well in America, even being thoroughly bashed by the literary critics of some of our major publications. As for myself, I found it distasteful, pretentious, and often very boring. Most of all, it seemed to me to be schizophrenic, undecided about exactly what kind of book it intends to be and sending very mixed messages.

The narrator, Dr. Maximilien Aue, is recounting his experiences during World War II as an officer of the SS, assigned to researching and writing reports on various problems encountered in dealing with Germany's undesirables, mainly the Jewish populations of conquered countries and areas. As such, he witnesses the wholesale slaughters in Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; escapes gravely wounded when the Germans are surrounded at Stalingrad; inspects Auschwitz and its satellite camps; experiences the last days of Berlin; and even meets Hitler in a highly unlikely scene in the last bunker. This is not a story of the armed conflicts of war, really, but a story of the bureaucracy and politics of government, albeit a government which has convinced itself of the necessity of eliminating millions of people in the name of racial purity.

Distasteful: Into the war story Littell inserts Max's personal story, which includes incest with his sister, anal self gratification, and vicious murders having nothing to do with war, all graphically described. Littell also includes feces, almost as a motif, with uncountable descriptions of s**t in all its manifestations. And the slaughter of the Jews is written about in such a disturbingly visual way that it nears to being a pornography of violence, almost like a snuff film.

Pretentious: The author is undoubtedly very intelligent and cultured and did a prodigious amount of research, but we do not need so many examples of his scholarship. For example, a very lengthy discussion of the languages of the Caucasus region seems to be entirely superfluous. The many discussions of the relative merits of composers just serve to illustrate that the author knows much about music. We learn the detailed results of Max's research, complete with statistics which are quite probably all accurate, but seem only to serve to illustrate that the author did his homework thoroughly.

Boring: Pages and pages and pages are given over to the infighting between various personalities and factions within the structure of the government bureaucracy. Many of the participants are actual personages, so perhaps this is very interesting to those in Europe and England more familiar with the names, but less interesting, for sure, to non-historians in America. The usage of all the initials for the various levels of the Nazi political structure make this even more opaque to an average American reader. The book's almost 1,000 pages includes at least 300 pages of material that is entirely non-essential to the plot.

Schizophrenic: What, exactly, is Littell trying to say here? He begins the novel this way: "Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened," and seems to be making a case in the opening chapters for the theory that anyone would have behaved as the Nazis did if put in the same situation. Max says, "But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did." He makes a good case for this viewpoint, particularly in citing Russia's history of political murder and America's history with the treatment of its Native Americans. Yet Littell then paints Max as such a degenerate that he is obviously not typical of most men. It is unclear whether or not Littell is trying to say that the Germans directly involved in the genocide of the Jews were all latent psychopaths.

Perhaps this novel is just so subtle that straight-forward-thinking Americans miss the point. I surely did.