Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones, 2006
Hands off the keyboard—we need to talk. Let’s discuss novels, the ones that let you inhabit characters, see places, reconstruct eras, forge allies, challenge enemies, and wait for the end. Writers know this well and craft stories hoping to give you all that, along with a place in that small, intangible fraction of the world. When you turn the last page, you need time to reflect, to decide if it was worth it, to discuss it with friends, recommend it to colleagues, or bring it up at parties.
Then the years pass, parties become rare, colleagues move on, and time filters out all but the great works, forgetting what was merely appealing or trendy. Forgettable novels fade, while the classics endure. That belief—no, bias—is why I feel both ashamed of what I’ve written and why I only read books published at least thirty or forty years ago. With a few exceptions, when certain people insist, call, write, saying, “Listen, you just have to read this, even if it’s brand new.”
That’s how it was with The Kindly Ones: two close friends, part of that dwindling circle I used to see often before someone hit pause on the world, called me. One even brought the book to my door. I eyed it suspiciously for a while, but after a few days, I started reading. And now, here I am, explaining why this novel is as significant as those published between the end of the Great War and the early 1990s.
The fabric holding this story together is World War II, told from the perspective of a Nazi officer. He is a grim little man—mildly homosexual, obsessively incestuous, possibly a matricide, certainly a murderer—yet endowed with a remarkable conscience. He recounts his life as a Nazi, from joining the SS to his final escape from the Russians, concealing his identity and nationality to evade post-war justice.
No spoilers here (and let’s not use that dreadful English word)—everything I’ve mentioned is on the back cover.
What won me over wasn’t the subject itself—thoroughly explored in literature and beyond—but the astonishingly detailed construction (not reconstruction) of both History and the protagonist’s own story, layered at every possible depth. There’s the war, but also his personal, intimate, familial, and sensory life.
If you’re used to reading—or worse, enjoying—those shallow little tales by thirty-something writers from Connecticut suburbs, whose greatest nightmare is a neighbor who hates hard rock, a boss who overlooks their talents, an absent father, an overbearing girlfriend, a hyperactive child, or a sick dog—then stay away from The Kindly Ones. You might not even grasp what this man is suffering from or what he’s searching for.
This is literature. Which means it’s life, flesh, blood—and death.
Maximilien Aue, a constitutional law expert, makes a mistake. To avoid punishment, he must accept something else. And once he does, he will commit any atrocity his role demands—not out of passion but out of duty. After all, he is German. Yet he will analyze his actions, reconsider them, observe them with detachment. He is both a body and, a thousand years and a thousand kilometers away, a mind watching that body.
Every line of this novel holds a depth and precision of construction and description that is hard to imagine for those who haven’t read it. Littell narrates regions, cities, years, moments, personalities, experiences, deviations, and aspirations as if he had lived them all firsthand. As if, in another life he vividly remembers, he had been both protagonist and antagonist, Nazi and Jew, Führer and einfacher Soldat. And this remains true from beginning to end.
The last fifty pages are unforgettable—a race against the death of body and soul, a plunge into unthinkable violence, a collapse of human categories, a grim excursion into the disappearance of humanity.
What does all this resemble? I can’t say with certainty. But if I had to lure someone into reading it, I’d mention Mann’s Death in Venice or Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. From the former, it takes the clarity in narrating emotions; from the latter, the fearless depiction of humanity’s darkest recesses and the courage to face judgment simply for existing—for being born, for having to die, for knowing oneself to be just a vertical animal, as others have aptly put it.
Some prominent critics argue that its brutality makes De Sade pale in comparison. I disagree. In De Sade, violence and depravity are the goal; the pleasure of another’s suffering is the experiment. And, after a few hundred pages, The 120 Days of Sodom hovers between repulsive and dull. In Littell’s novel, violence is merely the means to achieve the Reich’s objectives—whether some found pleasure in it is another matter.
The protagonist, Sturmbannführer Aue, commits violence out of duty, out of devotion—Bonhoeffer explained this as it was happening. He is a meticulous yet nauseated executor of the Nazi regime, striving to save prisoners’ lives, only to send them to factories instead of mass graves. But Aue is also self-destructive, consumed by an irreparable sorrow, tormented by an impossible and illicit love—his attachment to the memory of sodomizing his own sister.
Yet when faced with the choice to kill or be killed—even if the victim is a friend—he kills. Amid stray bullets, nearby explosions, comrades hanged for suspected desertion, boys executed for vague hints of collaboration, prisoners gassed in concentration camps, civilians crushed under tank treads, decadent parties in cities crumbling under bombardment, loathsome landlords, indescribably beautiful secretaries, misunderstood lovers, corrupt hierarchies, echoes of Bach, gangs of murderous children, and corpses covering the earth like a second skin, Maximilien trudges on. Cold and starving, through muddy fields, icy rivers, treacherous forests, and smoldering ruins—just to survive, to keep his pain alive inside a living body.
His pettiness is undeniable, perhaps even excessive at times. Some passages will physically repulse you, making his deliberate use of seduction impossible to ignore. (“A touch of the petty is needed for things to feel real. If angels took to writing, they’d be unreadable. Purity is hard to capture because it is incompatible with chatter.” —Emil Cioran).
Here, there is nothing pure—except the narrator’s talent and your own compulsion to keep reading, to follow the descent down those slippery steps leading to the basement of hell. To see whether hell contains only a demon, or something even worse: men who have seen the demon and can only save themselves by becoming more depraved than him.
So, I admit it—exceptions must be made to my bias. At least one recent novel is worth the sleepless nights spent reading it. Because its “recency” is invisible—it feels as if it were written during the war. These pages bear stains of blood, traces of metal, dust from crumbling walls, and clumps of mud. You might even dirty your fingers. You might smell the putrid stench of soldiers’ excrement and rotting corpses, but just a few pages earlier, you will have inhaled the perfume of Dr. Mandelbrod’s young assistants, seen them, desired them, as if they were sitting on your own couch.
A novel is always a construction, but here, the illusion is so perfectly realized that you, too, will feel cold, hunger, fear, horror, drunkenness, nausea, and desire. And when you finish, it will feel as if you have lived inside History—and, realizing you are still alive, as if you have narrowly escaped danger.
Venceslav Soroczynski
