The Kindly Ones

De: Jonathan Littell

Narrado por: Grover Gardner

“Simply astounding. . . . The Kindly Ones is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer.” — Time

A literary prize-winner that has been an explosive bestseller all over the world, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones has been called “a brilliant Holocaust novel. . . a world-class masterpiece of astonishing brutality, originality, and force,” (Michael Korda, The Daily Beast). Destined to join the pantheon of classic epics of war such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, The Kindly Ones offers a profound and gripping experience of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust.

A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss—even Hitler himself—play a role in Max's story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic, The Kindly Ones is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity—and the reader cannot look away.

©2009 Jonathan Littel; (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers

Great recording of interesting but lengthy book

Any additional comments?

The SS officer, sent to different theaters of WWII, narrates his experiences, ranging from comical to harrowing, in a calm, somewhat detached manner. This contrasts with the tremendous emotional and physical injuries he sustains along the way.
He frequently ruminates on why and how ordinary German soldiers and leaders perpetuated war crimes and crimes against humanity individually and on a grand scale. These passages are thoughtful but still unsatisfying.
He indulges in grotesque and fetishistic sexual fantasies, as well as senseless violence, which increase in frequency and intensity toward the end. These reveal the depth of his inner turmoil and unhappiness, bordering on madness, but go farther than necessary to make the point; by the end, they become unpleasant and irritating distractions, and likewise unsatisfying in helping the reader understand Max better.
The war takes him to Kiev in 1941, the Caucuses and Stalingrad in 1942, Crimea and Italy in 1943, Auschwitz in 1944, and Berlin until the end of the war. The descriptions of real German officers and leaders, Russian locals, attitudes, events, and horrors of war are absolutely superb.
The recording is excellent, as the narrator does a great job getting through lengthy, rambling passages, that may be otherwise hard to get through. He brings to life dialogues between characters, that would take mental effort to read through and unravel.

Read or listen only if you have a strong stomach.

An excellent take on a fictional SS officer, who rubs shoulders with many historical figures, and some not so well known. Another excellent narration by Grover Gardner.

Intense

This is a very intense book to get through. The violence is very blunt and macabre the sex is full on shock value and the morals leave you questioning the whole book. But it’s very well written and gives such a great description of WW2 from a side not often explored.

The one insanity of war keeps coming round to drive the protagonist even more deranged with each day.

This book took me a long time to read. Often I had to stop for my own mental health but in the end I am wowed by how much has been captured so accurately by the author and narrator.

Shocking yet compelling

I found this book to be shocking but so well written that I thought the author had to have been there. The narrator was excellent. During the book I wavered between empathy for Max and revulsion. However, at the end of the book, when I though I had been shocked as much as possible, I was shocked again. I actually did something I seldom do. At the end of the book, I started at the beginning again.

Mesmerising

A tour de force. The amount of research, the historic accuracy (see Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder), the soulless protagonist and his perversions (they enliven the character but in no way “explain” his acceptance and active participation in the nazi horrors), EVERYTHING contributes to this masterpiece.
I bought it because I couldn’t find the original French version. I read it when it was published and I was in shock. The translation is good, without being exceptional, losing something of the horrendous lyricism of the Nazis, extraordinarily rendered in the original version. But it preserves the essential: how an “intellectual” became a monster.
This is a “livre-monde”, a book that recreates a world per se, and this world is hell.
The Shoah by bullets (Babi Yar and so many others sites of horror), the death camps, the deportations, the destruction of the European Jews, the gas vans, invented by the Stalinists and reimplemented by the Nazis…
A lesson in history.
The so-called digressions (linguistics, politics, music, literature etc.) enhance the monstrosity of the main character and his peers.
And yes, there are shocking descriptions of bodily functions, there is incest, rape, They show how amorality led to immorality, and finally to a serial killer’s perverse mind.
Do not read it if you expect euphemisms.
But do read it if you want some understanding of a mass crime that may be committed again. Because sadly, hatred is a part of human nature.