The Kindly Ones — 983 pages of controversy
There’s a serious kerfuffle (if there can be such a thing) brewing in the book world over Jonathan Littell’s new novel, The Kindly Ones.
This 983 page doorstop is the fictional memoir of an unrepentant Nazi SS officer who dabbles in genocide, incest, and highbrow intellectual studies. The novel was originally published in 2006 in France where it won the country’s highest literary honor, the Prix Goncourt, for its American-born author. Now that it has finally been translated back into the author’s first language and published in the U.S., the novel is garnering such wildly polarized reviews that it almost seems critics are reading entirely different books.
The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani describes it as “willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent” and “a pointless compilation of atrocities . . . pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies.”
The Washington Post’s review condemns the book as “expansive and repulsive . . . narratively empty and intellectually incoherent” in its dismissal of the novel as “death porn.”
Meanwhile, an interesting piece in the Globe and Mail defends the book against “over the top” American criticism and describes it as “a microscopic examination of the mind and soul of a German perpetrator of the Holocaust who has never heard the term ‘the Holocaust.’” Reviewer Peter Scowan praises the author for forcing readers to confront a character acting in his own historical point in time with his own particular, horrific human reasoning.
The Austin American-Statesman’s reviewer notes biographical details about the author that may explain some of the novel’s difficult and controversial themes. While Littell spent a decade as a humanitarian relief worker in Bosnia and Chechnya, he currently subscribes “to a point of view that says our existence is completely meaningless and completely absurd.”
If nothing else, perhaps this explains the novel’s rapturous, award-winning reception in France.
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[...] array of scathing criticism earned by Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones reminded me just how fun it is to read a [...]