If I hadn’t made the mistake of trying to read J.M.G. Le Clézio’s tedious and dreadful Terra Amata, which remains unfinished and therefore unreviewed, The Kindly Ones would easily be the worst book I’ve read this year. Unlike Le Clézio’s stinker, Littell’s book is at least readable in the literal sense, but it has no virtues beyond that.
Max Aue is a homosexual member of the SD, a committed Nazi and an active participant in the holocaust. He is present, Forrest Gump-like, at virtually every significant event of the war, from the massacre at Babi Yar to the battle of Stalingrad (which he is transferred into after the Germans’ encirclement is complete), to the fall of Berlin.
Along the way he engages in a series of bizarre sexual practices – one of which is raping his own sister, another where he literally fucks his entire house, which he follows up by sodomising himself with a tree while the SS turn up to arrest him. Oh, and he murders his parents. Then he tells us that the holocaust was perpetrated by people “just like you”. Alongside the main narrative of the unfolding horror of the war (which Aue does not himself find horrifying), there is also a badly-written detective story, with two gumshoes from the Kripo trying to find his parents’ murderer. The closing pages of the novel have him being decorated by Hitler in person, during which he punches the Führer in the face knocking out several of his teeth, before killing both of his police pursuers after escaping from custody. It’s beyond ridiculous.
Worse than that, it’s badly written. The tone is homogenous and boring, and the text is probably twice as long as it should be, while Littell’s regard for his own prose is out of all kilter with its quality – the publishers trailed the novel with a pompous little booklet of extracts, essays and a letter to translators from the author.
The reason the book has received so much attention is that it won both of the major French literary prizes as well as an overwhelmingly positive press there. Littell is American, but grew up in Europe and writes in French.
I had originally planned an enormous post picking the novel apart piece by piece – I finished reading it back in May – but I’ve since decided that it doesn’t deserve the attention. It’s a profoundly bad book. Avoid it at all costs.
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