Jonathan Littell - Les Bienveillantes ("The kindly ones")

I read it in French when it came out. It's a hell of tale but seriously nasty and upsetting.

i just bought it and what you wrote is the most common response, though ive also heard some reviewers saying its like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, which i highly doubt cause those 2 responses and the style of the novel doesnt fit together.

I can see the Tolstoy in it, and it has a hard inner darkness that recalls Dostoyevsky at times. He did some amazing research for it, btw.

Here's what I wrote after finishing it in February, 2007:

"When you spend over a month reading a dense, 900 page book, it often takes more than a day to fully digest it. I do, however, have some semi-coherent thoughts. I won't write any spoilers but until you've read the book, they mightn't make much sense. I highly recommend this book when it comes out in English.

It's great that Dr. Aue is not a caricature of an SS officer, though he's believable as one. Nazis are so iconic that it's hard, even when writing history not to mention litracha, not to fall into the facile trap of writing them shallowly and without insight. The question of whether he's immoral or amoral is an interesting one and I haven't quite made up my mind.

Dr. Aue is not reliable as a narrator, is he? I'm not sure.

This is one of the most disgusting books I have ever read both in terms of the events that he recounts and the constant scatological, sexual, nauseating and genocidal imaginings of the narrator but those passages that are supposed to be erotic, work surprisingly well though their proximity to the rest of the récit is troubling.

I'm still working on the significance of the cops for Littel as well as the meaning of Leland and Mandelwhatever.

This isn't magical realism but the hallucinatory qualities of some of the book along with the dreams and delirium are outstanding. It's not horror either as there's none of the sense of foreboding and eerieness that that genre requires. It's often little more than unrelenting but fascinating disgust. Everybody knows that they were more than just cold hearted killers, that many were sleazy gangster types as well, but Littel's description of the office politics, the corporate ladder, so to speak, and the bureaucratic nightmare of Nazi Germany is as terrifiying as any volitional malevolence.

Just as some English people, perhaps through racism, detected something foreign about Conrad's prose, I feel like I can detect something American in Littel's writing. His French is excellent and thoroughly convincing and maybe my perception is more suggestion than reality but strangely, the occasional and slight oddness is well suited to a narrative supposedly written by a francophone German.

For all the criticism that Schindler's list and other books and movies get for telling the story of the Holocaust not from the Jewish persective or the perspective of some other class of victim, this book sidesteps this interestingly. It's not a book about the suffering of the Jews. It's a book about the suffering of the Germans, of what a generation of Germans brought upon themselves; the ruined cities, the tarnished pride, the millions of war dead, the fear, suffering, and deprivation.

I'm really, really curious to know what Littel thinks of Borges' 'Deutsches Requiem'."

thanks for that.
but, considering the fact that Littell book is a docodrama that is being told by first person with no dialouge, and the fact that Tolstoy's prose is almost always told from the p.o.v. of a third person know it all and has lots of dialouges in it plus is known for his humanism,religious, and philosophical issues (and is not known for a sensational writing, a thing that some say Littell's book has more than enough of it), what is common between them?

(i didnt read it yet, everything is from what i was reading about it)

The scope is certainly Tolstoyan. The Dostoyevsky comparison is more apt. There's certainly some 'Notes from Underground' influence.

Oh god this book... I remember reading it and not being able to stop, all the while being really put off by it. I really have a tough time saying anything constructive about it, so I'll just take the easy way out and say M. White otm.

Still sitting on my shelf unread :(

The thing is huge, intimidating and weighs at least half a ton

Just finished Laurence Binet's _HHhH_, where he worries about Littell's book, and about how to write a big book about Nazis soon after someone else has just written a big book about Nazis. Binet ends by being (overly, I think) snarky, "_The Kindly Ones_ is simpy 'Houellebecq does Nazism."

LOL

Btw, Littel's editor is in the middle of a giant shitstorm over remarks he made about Breivik

What did the editor say about the Norwegian? (Sounds like a bad joke waiting to happen.).

My personal favorite Littell tidbit comes from an Amazon review of his little-read first book, a cyberpunk-esque piece from the late 80s, I think. Some Parisian felt impelled to suggest that Littell touristed his way through, and lifted his characters from real life - http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Voltage-Signet-Jonathan-Littell/dp/0451160142