Audiobook Review:
The Kindly Ones (2006)
by Jonathan Littell
I noticed that Spotify now has unlimited streaming for Audiobooks for premium members. The project of this blog has been linked to new technologies for reading/watching/listening to novels, other books and movies, going back to watching Criterion Collection titles on Hulu plus back in the day. Self-recording was critical to the entire music projects- all the artists I worked with started recording themselves on Macintosh computers. I saw that the Audiobook of The Kindly Ones, one of my favorite books ever, was freely available on Spotify so I thought I would give it a listen. I really love the novel, and I also love the fact that it was a huge critical and commercial hit in France, and when it was translated into English and published in the US, the critical reaction was along the lines of "What is WRONG with the French." It makes sense if you remember critical attitudes of the period.
It's been eight years since I read The Kindly Ones, but I still remembered most of the plot points. In preparing this post I noticed I've mentioned it seven times in other posts about different books, which has to be close to a record. The Audiobook narrator, Grover Gardner, is a stone-cold pro, and it is easy to lose yourself for hours in the "pleasures" of the prose. The most shocking chapters remain shocking, and I was better able to follow the more tedious conversations about the intellectual roots of anti semitism in the third reich. It was also easier to keep track of his schizophrenic episodes near the end of the book. At forty hours, it is a time commitment, but much easier than the thousand page length of the book version.
Published 10/14/18
The Kindly Ones (2006)
by Jonathan Littell
Replaces: Adjunct by Peter Manson (UNREAD)
It's curious how The Kindly Ones, published in French in 2006 but not in English until 2009, made it into the first revision of the 1001 Books list. That first revision was published in 2008, after the French language publication but before the English translation published in 2009, meaning the inclusion was based on reading the French original. The stay on the 1001 Books list was brief, The Kindly Ones was dumped in favor of a new Paul Auster novel in 2010.
The book it replaces, Adjunct by Peter Manson, is the most unreadable book in the original 1001 Books list, and also wholly unavailable in the United States- lacking even a listing on Amazon. It's one thing for a book to be out of print on Amazon, quite another for Amazon to never have heard of said book, particularly one that was published as recently as 2009. It seems like unattainability should be a disqualifier for a book that is judged to be a reading "must," and excluding Adjunct from the first revision on this basis seems entirely fair to me.
The Kindly Ones, on the other hand, makes sense, it's a Prix Goncort (French Pulitzer, basically) winner, written by an American author in the French language. It is about that favorite subject of early 21st century European fiction, the Nazi's, specifically, the perspective of Nazi's themselves. Maxmillien Aue, the well educated, literate narrator- writer, really, of The Kindly Ones, is reflecting on his experience in World War II as a member of the SS. As he writes the book, we know that he has survived World War II and lived out a life as a Belgian silkmaker.
The Kindly Ones is his memoirs as a kind of Nazi SS Forest Gump- present at all the hits of the German atrocities of World War II in his status as first as a direct participant in the messy, early stages of Jewish elimination in the Ukraine, and then as an analyst in the Ukraine, a survivor of the decisive battle of Stalingrad, where he is shot clean through the head and survives, then as a special advisor on the problem of using Jewish labor for economic purposes instead of just killing them all.
Aue has a personal life as "interesting" as his professional life- specifically a still-dedicated sister fucker- his twin no less, a vast, poorly understood hatred for his Mother, and a non-existent relationship with his proto-Nazi father, who disappeared before Maxmillien had a chance to form a relationship. It won't surprise anyone to learn that Aue is also an active pursuer of being the receiving partner in anal sex, with boys he seeks out on the streets and bars of pre-war Berlin. All of these elements twist and turn over the almost 1000 (992) page, and I felt like my choice of the nearly 40 hour Audiobook was a solid selection over the actual book or an Ebook (impossible!) edition.
Littell spares no detail in the underlying research, which, inserted into the narrative, forms a non-fiction narrative about the events and motivations of major participants in the anti-Jewish extermination process by the Germans, from the perspective of the actors. Aue, despite his misgivings about the choice of extermination, believes it to be a "done deal," and thus beyond his pay grade to question. He is also a committed National Socialist, in the sense that he also despises the Prussian aristocracy which dominates German society in the early 20th century.
It is worth pointing out that much of the contents of The Kindly Ones are terribly disturbing. Littell does not shy away from describing the mechanics of massacring a village of Jews with hand guns, and his febrile dream sequences are replete with enough coprophagia and anal sex to make the Marquise de Sade blush. It also is worth pointing out fictional narratives about genocide from the perspective of the perpetrator have their value in the sense that they add to the diversity of narratives about important historical events and thus add to the chance that the memory of such events will remain alive in the memory of the descendants.
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