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Laskavé Bohyně (2006)

by Jonathan Littell(Favorite Author)

3.98 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Odeon

review 1: I was thoroughly transfixed by this book. It occupied my thoughts and even my dreams for the entire week it took me to read it. At one point my mother (I was visiting her) complained, “You’re not being very sociable. You’re totally engrossed in that book!” She didn’t understand, this has to be the very finest literary treatment of the Holocaust in decades, maybe several decades. It is a masterpiece. And the irony of it is, that even though the Nazi narrator/perpetrator argues through his extended plea for sympathy, a justification for the crimes he and his compatriots committed against the groups of people they designated as “subhuman”—primarily Jews and Slavs—this narrative nevertheless owes a tremendous amount to Russian literature. The first echo of th... moree Russians I caught was in the very opening paragraph. “Oh, my brothers, let me tell you how it happened. I am not your brother, you’ll retort, and I don’t want to know. And it certainly is true that this is a bleak story, but an edifying one, too, a real morality play, I assure you. You might find it a bit long—a lot of things happened after all—but perhaps you’re not in too much of a hurry; with a little luck you’ll have some time to spare. And also, this concerns you: you’ll see that this concerns you.” I heard Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in this introductory paragraph—the confessional mode of the unrepentant (if troubled) but clearly guilty sinner, the “we’re all flawed human beings together” stance. And indeed, “The Kindly Ones” might be read on some level as the extended confessions of a twentieth-century Underground Man. A few sentences later, decided echoes of Nabokov: “For a long time, we crawl upon this earth like caterpillars, waiting for the splendid, diaphanous butterfly we bear within ourselves. And then time passes and the nymph stage never comes, we remain larvae—what do we do with such an appalling realization? Suicide, of course, is always an option.” Nabokov is omnipresent in “The Kindly Ones,” as far as I am concerned, most obviously in the theme of incest and doubles (twins, a form of doubles, are a leitmotif in Littell’s work), but also in the combination of, on the one hand, the perpetrator’s monstrous emotional detachment from his own horrific crimes, and on the other, his vague, oscillating awareness (translating initially into mental and physical disturbances and eventually into insanity) of the bottomless depth of human suffering he has inflicted and his own individual guilt before his fellow human beings. The anti-hero/unreliable narrator Maximilian Aue (and what a stupendously clever surname, what else but “Awe” can we feel before unspeakable—but here spoken—evil?) is a worldly intellectual who reads French literature and listens to French classical music (he wanted to be a pianist, but never learned!), all the while fancying himself innumerable cuts above the common stripe of dull, poorly educated German bureaucrats/war criminals. This, even as he assures us that all of us, in his shoes (or in the shoes of any of his intellectually dull, bourgeois colleagues such as Adolf Eichmann), would have behaved exactly the same way as he did!(And lest you think my theory of the influence of Russian and émigré Russian literature is far-fetched, while Aue is on assignment in the Soviet Caucasus he deliberately visits historical sites connected with the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, and, in obvious imitation of his literary hero, even seeks to provoke a Lermontovian, Romantic duel to the death with one of his enemies in his Einsatzgruppe.)Of course, I can understand why a lot of people here really hated this book. It’s horrific and excessive and on these and so many other levels very challenging to read. Certainly I can’t hope to persuade the reluctant here to read it (I would never demand that my mother read it!), but nor can I do the complexity of “The Kindly Ones” any real justice in such a short review. That said, the best review of this book I have yet read is by the scholar Eric Sandberg in the “Cambridge Quarterly,” September 2014, v. 43, no. 3. In his essay, “The Incomprehensible Thing,” Sandberg contends that “through its aesthetics of excess, ‘The Kindly Ones’ first demonstrates the habitualisation and domestication which threaten our cultural memory of the Holocaust, and then acts to defamiliarise our reading of these events. By adopting an excessive narrative position and an excessive narrative technique, it revitalises our understanding of and feeling for both the events it depicts, and the ways they affect us. Bataille’s pornographic, obscene, and obsessive narrator writes that ‘to others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes.’ Like Aue, whose wound at Stalingrad opens his ‘third eye, a pineal eye, one not turned to the sun, but directed at the darkness, gifted with the power of looking at the bare face of death,’ the reader of ‘The Kindly Ones’ experiences a renewed vision of human suffering through the novel’s aesthetics of excess.”
review 2: This is the first time I've felt compelled to write a Goodreads review, and I think it's because I find it impossible to fit this book into a simple 5-star rating. I wish I were able to read it in its original French, as by most accounts something is lost in the English translation, but here are my thoughts nonetheless.The Kindly Ones is difficult to read for many reasons - the length of the book, the paragraphs that run on for pages, the lack of dialogue demarcation, the confusing German military bureaucracy, and, of course, the subject matter. I don't think the Holocaust will ever cease to be a horrifying topic; this book offers the most chilling details I've read up to this point, in part because they are offered so matter-of-factly. I have to say that I found the descriptions of Dr. Aue's sexual inclinations gratuitous at times and didn't always understand how they fit into the overall narrative. This is a book I will continue to think about for a long time, partly because of its disturbing nature, but also because of a particular idea of Dr. Aue's: "There was a lot of talk, after the war, in trying to explain what had happened, about inhumanity. But I am sorry, there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity: and that Doll is a good example. What else was he, Doll, but a good family man who wanted to feed his children, and who obeyed his government, even though in his innermost being he didn't entirely agree? If he had been born in France or America, he'd have been called a pillar of society and a patriot; but he was born in Germany, and so he is a criminal...Doll killed people or had them killed, so he's Evil; but within himself, he was a good man to those close to him, indifferent to all others, and, what's more, one who respected the law. What more do we ask of the individual in our civilized, democratic cities?" less

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Reviews (see all)

Angelina413

This is a huge book, 975 dense pages in the English translation I read. It is historical fiction of WW2 as narrated by a Nazi SD officer. Though reading it is a huge undertaking, much of it is extremely gripping, so it isn't that difficult to get through. I have heard an aphorism to the effect that music exists to say things that cannot be said with words. In the same vein, fiction exists to illuminate some ineffable truths that non-fiction can't quite manage to convey. This is one of those fictional works - akin to 1984, All Quiet On The Western Front, Catch 22, et al. No book can better explain how the Germans could do what they did - to quote the book's narrator: "there is no inhumanity, just humanity." How nationalism, extreme bureaucracy, and the relaxation of moral standards in war, can turn a Christian nation into the evil machine that was Nazi Germany.For anyone uncertain about whether to take on the challenge of reading the whole book, read from middle of page 670 to the middle of page 672, to get a sense for how the author engages your mind.I must also note that this book is the most comprehensively researched novel I have ever encountered. The level of (seemingly accurate) detail throughout is mind boggling. I can understand why the French granted Jonathan Littell honorary citizenship for the writing of this book (first published in French in 2006).

alitarose

Οι Ευμενίδες -μπορούν άραγε ποτέ να μεταμορφωθούν ξανά σε Ερινύες;- προσπαθούν να γαληνέψουν ένα ταραγμένο μυαλό, να καταλαγιάσουν μια κατακεραυνωμένη ψυχή, να χαρίσουν λύτρωση μέσα από τη λήθη. Η αποστολή τους δύσκολη: Ένα πρώην στέλεχος των SS, με θητεία στο Ανατολικό Μέτωπο, μορφωμένος, πιστός εθνικοσοσιαλιστής, αφηγείται τη ζωή του. Ένας χειμαρρώδης μονόλογος, χωρίς ανάσες, χωρίς οίκτο, χωρίς έλεος. Δύσκολη η δουλειά των Ευμενίδων!

meenu

stunning, brilliant and wildly ambitious!

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