Last autumn, I finally read a book I’d put off reading for years because I suspected (rightly, it turns out) that it would be uniquely harrowing. Jonathan Littell’s notorious, extremely long novel of the Second World War, The Kindly Ones, was a tremendous success on its first publication in French in 2006 (as Les Bienveillantes). It won its previously unknown author the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, and was a bestseller in France and several other European countries.
The book’s Wikipedia page contains this pleasing phrase: “Word of mouth and enthusiastic reviews soon catapulted sales to such an extent that Gallimard had to stop publishing the latest Harry Potter novel in order to meet the demand for The Kindly Ones.” Littell was reportedly paid around $1 million for its English translation rights, but when it was published by Harper Collins in 2009 in a translation by Charlotte Mandell, The Kindly Ones met with critical derision and sold a fraction of what its publishers hoped it would. Littell has since faded in prominence from the Anglophone literary landscape (while some of his subsequent books have been translated, they have received little attention and certainly earned no seven-figure advances). Articles by Littell on war and geopolitics occasionally appear in the likes of the Guardian and New Statesman; in March 2022, Le Monde published an open letter in which he urged his “Russian friends” to overthrow Vladimir Putin.
The Kindly Ones is presented as the memoirs of a Nazi SS officer and Holocaust perpetrator who, looking back across decades on his activities during the war, recounts in extreme detail and without contrition his active role in mass murder. Put more succinctly still, it’s a 1,000-page novel about the Shoah told exclusively and exhaustively from a Nazi perspective. It takes in, among very much else, the massacre of almost 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Ukraine (described in a gruesome set-piece that might have sprung from the brain of the Marquis de Sade — an author Littell has translated into English), the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler’s Führerbunker Götterdämmerung, and, inevitably, the death camps. There are cameos or more significant roles for virtually every prominent Nazi, from Höss to Himmler, Mengele to Eichmann, Heydrich to Hitler, along with writers and other cultural figures from the era. The novel’s narrator, Dr Maximilian Aue, begins his account of the war on the Eastern Front, where he served as a member of an Einsatzgruppe (the mobile paramilitary units who carried out the extermination prior to the establishment of the concentration camp network), before rising through the SS ranks to a central administrative role in the bureaucracy of genocide.
Part of what makes The Kindly Ones so extraordinary and erratic a war novel is its very Frenchness. We are accustomed to such thick novels tackling the vast subject of war from within a humanist, Tolstoyan tradition, but Littell is rooted in a contrary, largely Francophone tradition of extreme literature. His forebears are Sade, Bataille, Genet, Céline, and Baudelaire, along with renegade non-Frenchmen such as William Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis (Littell was, in fact, born in the United States — his father was a successful spy novelist — but grew up in France). His infernal narrator is both a committed National Socialist and a severely troubled pervert: page after page describe Aue’s depraved sexual acts and fantasies as the strain of committing atrocities, compounded by his closeted homosexuality and memories of childhood incest with his sister Una, brings on a nightmarish psychic deterioration. Rivers of shit flow through the book, amid corpses and gore, vomit and stench, torture and abjection.
Surprisingly, in light of his penchant for the transgressive, Littell’s professional background prior to publishing The Kindly Ones in his late 30s was in humanitarian work. Before quitting his job to spend a year and a half researching the Holocaust and travelling in the Eastern Front, he lived in multiple conflict zones as an aid worker for Action Against Hunger — work which provided the insight into bureaucracies and conflict that gave texture to his densely realised novel. Some critics suggested that The Kindly Ones — whose perverse level of detail regarding the minutiae of Nazi extermination mirrors the perversity of the Final Solution itself — reads less as a novel than a work of dramatised documentation.
But Littell, with his arsenal of rogue literary influences, animates his vast knowledge of his subject with the added metaphysical, moral, and psychic dimensions of fiction. As he has somewhat grandly put it in an interview: “You can do things with literature that you’re not allowed to do in other regimes of discourse.” And so we’re presented with such phantasmic images as that of a thundering Adolf Hitler, at a rally Aue attends while his sanity is collapsing, transforming before our eyes… into a rabbi.
Reading Littell’s book last autumn, I found myself having one of those overwhelming literary experiences we’re lucky if we enjoy (though in the present case that may not be the right word) every few years, the kind that had me cancelling social engagements. So absorbed was I that, over the weeks it took me to read the novel, I failed to notice myself sink into a black and choking depression. More accurately, I realised I had become intensely hopeless in my outlook, but somehow (this seems incredible to me now) I failed to connect my reading material to this state of dejection.
Meanwhile, I talked fervently to whoever was around about the amazing novel I was reading, which, I assured them, was both a towering work of literature and as black and punishing a document as I’d ever encountered (strangely, I couldn’t quite convince anyone to read it). When I was 200 pages from the end, a friend and I happened to eat some psilocybin mushrooms. As the effects took hold I felt myself being submerged in the hellish, quicksand imagery and suffocating nihilism of Littell’s novel. The universe was evil — life itself was an infinite gas chamber. When the trip was over I’d made the connection that had previously eluded me, and the following morning the gloom had lifted — I finished the novel in sunlight.
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