Almost 5 years after reading this, just stumbled onto your review. I still hold this as the best book I have ever read. It just speaks for itself that it stuck with me all this time.
Dude this is one of my favorites. Read it it in excellent German translation as well. Last week at the grocery store I tell the clerk who is a friend about a transformative book about the horror of war and as soon as I say the title the lady behind me says “oh lord it is so good but so brutal I could not finish it.” I responded with total understanding. You have to be in good balanced mental condition to read this but it is sooo important IMO. It conveys the mayhem of war better than the best and well-meaning reportage, documentary etc
That's a great way of putting it! Definitely agree about how it conveys "the mayhem of war" better than a lot of other sources. The Kindly Ones certainly isn't for the faint of heart.
@@travelthroughstories some of the journalists covering the war in Ukraine - many from a safe desk at the HQ in the West - should really read this (together with some Chris Hedges !!!): I am nauseated by the headlines in German press pretending to be surprised that soldiers commit heinous "war crimes" ...
Read this book when I was in University. I can’t deny that it is flawed yet it remains quite simply the most memorable reading experience I may have ever had. The tone, the scenes, the narration, everything feels so evocative. Not to mention some incredibly well executed plunges into surrealism in my opinion. But yes not for the faint hearted! Enjoyed your review!
It definitely is a memorable reading experience! The "plunges into surrealism" is a great way to put it - I completely agree that those moments are brilliant. Thanks for watching!
I read it I think 7 years ago. I found it by chance while browsing a bookshelf in a hostel in Liverpool. I started reading it because I have an interest in history and ww2, and the book happened to be in Swedish which is my mother tongue. When I got back home I went straight to the library to borrow it. It fascinated me. Like you said, it's rare that we get the Holocaust from the perspective of the Nazis, and it really is frightening. It has stuck with me, and I think it is an important read.
Just ordered a copy of this book and I cannot wait to read it. Perhaps it’s a bit late, but for any looking to read a (sort of) companion book to The Kindly Ones, I highly recommend “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher Browning. Fascinating book that touches on many of the same questions, from what I can tell.
Great discussion, Sean. As you describe, the perpetual machinery of evil that humans have created is terrifying and must be confronted if we are to change. That sense of having to continually wrestle with a narrator who is trying to deflect, persuade, or seduce the reader can be challenging. I can see the parallels to Cormac McCarthy. Thanks for sharing! Cheers, Jack
Thank you, Jack! Yes, it's an exhausting book, but I think it's really a necessary perspective to consider even if only to fight against. There are definitely McCarthyian vibes going on here, which makes sense as I'm sure McCarthy had Nazism in mind when constructing the judge.
I loved this book. It took me around 4 months to finish due to the emotional toll it can take on the reader. Some of my favorite parts of this book are not really important to the story but detail the philosophical and ethical aspects of the story. First is the old Jewish man who seeks out Aue while researching in the Caucuses mountains. I won’t ruin what takes place but it’s extremely powerful. Second is the engineer who only wants to build bridges but is tasked with destroying them. He hangs on telling himself there’s still hope to rebuild what’s been destroyed. This book is extremely powerful and very surreal post his head wound. The end was off the wall
I recently finnished this great book in german. I can truely say that this book has changed me and the way how i imagine that time. I often tried to imagine how the Nazis were thinking because my grandfather was part of the SS, thats why this topic haunts me. It might be an ugly book, but it is very nescassary. It has to be ugly, because what happened was very ugly and describing it in any other, less drastic way would downplay the impact of this moral abyss that happened. It is not the fault of Jonathan Littell that this book exists, it is the fault of the Germans that were attracted by the Nazi regime.
Very interesting, and very well done! This was super smooth, you clearly don't need to script at all! How is the prose and the writing of the book? Is there anything interesting about the craft of this novel or is it more the uncomfortable ideas that makes it worth engaging with?
Thanks so much, Echo! The issue with no script is that I forget to talk about very basic things like the prose.... haha. I thought the prose was honestly a bit bland. I'd have to guess that it was a stylistic choice to write in a bland prose as it mirrors Aue's cold, banal, and bureaucratic perspective, if that makes sense, but it made the book a bit dry. Some of the descriptions of war, atrocities, and sex were quite...memorable, but for the most part, the narrator's voice is rather underwhelmingly cold and straight-forward. This is all to say that I think the prose matches the subject matter and Max Aue's character quite well, but The Kindly Ones certainly wasn't super interesting at the craft level. Thanks for bringing this up - I definitely meant to mention it!
I always try to read from the german points of view when I can because I have ancestors that took part, not germans but who had to deal with the partisans and I want to know more or less what they felt and saw. This book reflect exactly how someone can feel trap in the killing machine like many of the Max subordinates, common soldiers and even a driver, they can't just say "I don't want to" they have to follow orders. About Max I see him more like an extreamly disturbed person whit no empathy rather than evil, a sick man.
Extraordinary review, very interesting. I'm attracted to reading it, but I cannot prioritize it being it 1000 pages, 300 pages too long and "one of the most disturbing books" that you and many have read. Thanks for the analysis for the rest of us. By the way, I arrived to this book because of the war in Ukraine.
Thank you for watching! Reading this during the war in Ukraine is especially disturbing as so much of the book focuses on that region. It's definitely a book that is worth your time, but you need to be in the right headspace for it, so I don't blame anyone for not prioritizing it.
I wonder, at what year was this memoir supposedly written? I mean, it is never detailed in the book, when the main character writes his memoirs. I think Vietnam War is mentioned by him, so it must be written in the 1970s, the earliest.
Makes me want to read it. I have read Child of God and it did not occur to me that it might be controversial. I guess people who cannot countenance how people are will have a problem. But for me part of the reason is precisely because l can enter the worlds of people and circumstances outside my own experience.
It's incredibly intense - it left me exhausted. Haha. I need to read more of Sandman. I've only read one or two volumes. I just haven't been able to find cheap copies and never bothered to get it from the library. Is it worth reading? (Also, God help the person who accidentally picks this book up thinking it's a Gaiman work...)
@@travelthroughstories sandman is incredible stuff. I bought the absolute editions when they go on sale; they get quite low sometimes and are totally worth it. Oversized, recoloured, and many have interesting extras, such as one of the most famous ones broken down into script form and art direction. Not much comes close to it.
@@SpringboardThought Good to know - I'll keep my eye out for those ones! I almost bought the omnibus editions when they were on sale a few years ago, but didn't. What I read of the series, I loved, so I hope I can find them soon.
@@travelthroughstories omnibuses are good too, but reading oversized collections are the ultimate experience. The first couple editions are recoloured, and easier to read because they sharpened the text with the update. I think it’s worth it, if you’re patient. In Canada they hover around $160 MSRP, I didn’t pay more than $90 for any of them, so they drop fairly regularly, I think.
@@SpringboardThought Awesome. I'll add them to the top of my search list. That's one of the reasons I haven't picked them up yet - I was never sure which edition was the best. So thanks for clarifying that!
I read/watched quite a lot of fiction and non-fiction about the holocaust and WW2, so I thought I could handle this book. Eventually I finished it, but was nauseous most of the time and had really detailed and surreal nightmares in the months it took me to get through it. I'm interested to hear from you and others in the comments here, why was his perversion such a big part of the plot? why was it so detailed? It seemed contradictory to the underlying claim that Aue, as a representative of nazis, was "just and average joe" caught up in the monstrosities.
Completely agree that Aue's constant perversions undermined the idea that he was just an ordinary guy, swept up Nazism. I'm not exactly sure what to do with it, to be honest, other than suggest that perhaps Littell was trying to link Aue's perversion with the long history that resulted in both him and the Nazis. That is, neither came ex nihilo - both are predicated on a long history of the West that goes back to the Greeks, which this book's title and structure suggest are fundamental to understanding Nazism. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts though.
@@travelthroughstories Because nazism is transgression. "Average Joes" (probably raised christian - "thou shall not kill") who would have repressed their pulsions and stayed ordinary in a "normal" society were given the opportunity - even more, it was expected of them - to kill civilians in large numbers. Once such a massive transgression occurs with the blessings of the power in place, why stop there? Everything becomes possible without any repercussions. Morality flights out the window and the gates are wide open for every kind of transgression and perversion to be acted upon with impunity.
Good point about 'other human beings being other human beings'. It's a truism: 'I belong to the same species as such-and-such exemplar of evil', but one that tends to immediately demand clarification and walking back so as to preempt being possibly misconstrued as a slippery, backdoor rhetorical maneuver. A lot of the time empathy (as opposed to sympathy, by definition crucially different) registers as a sign of creeping intellectual pollution. Going by the impression I get of more prosaically unlikeable protagonists being a huge problem and hurdle for a lot of readers, I think culture is likely to remain largely hostile to books like The Kindly Ones for simply being too perverse.
For sure. It does seem to be an increasing fact that modern readers struggle more and more with separating the worldviews/actions of a book's characters with the larger points that the book is exploring. It's certainly easier to scoff at reading this behemoth because of its contents rather than critically dealing with Aue's character.
Just finished the audiobook. The performer did amazing with the German and French pronunciation. I'm going to gibe it a second listen but there is a ton of deep historical lore hidden in there. I could've done without the graphic sexual imagery, the German sexual imagery.
Agreed that this is a book that demands (and deserves) a reread! There's a ton in there that absolutely went over my head on my first read and only read anyways.
The soldiers are (almost always) just propaganda-prone people or careerists that grab the "job" opportunity. They get a bit of the blame for not thinking critically. BTW I think you'll like The disconnected by Oguz Atay.
I'm sure there are plenty of those kinds of soldiers, though I know too many veterans to make a general criticism like that. I've heard so many good things about The Disconnected (mainly from Book Shore) - the second I can get my hands on it, I'll read it for sure!
@@ivailopetrov2827 I thought I saw someone from the publisher mention that they were working on a new translation.. I could be wrong though. Apparently there are a few libraries nearby that have it - I may have to pick it up!
How are you doing mr sean iam new subscriber Arabic lady citizen since Christmas 2019 I began to subscribe to British and American TH-cam channels we are as foreigners subscribers as overseas students want to increase our cultural level improve our English language as well literature lovers too I just found out last month there are book tubes channels it’s great ideas to show people books and encourage them to read learn new information can you imagine iam subscriber to dr Barry vann he is retried dean 19 episodes only about surnames in USA if you please I looked up for your name it’s Irish origin means gracious or gift from god my name too is Turkish origin means Nobel lady as princess I gathered key points about famous book you mentioned briefly here it’s kindly ones is 2006 historical fiction novel written in French by American born author Jonathan littell .
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Almost 5 years after reading this, just stumbled onto your review. I still hold this as the best book I have ever read. It just speaks for itself that it stuck with me all this time.
Dude this is one of my favorites. Read it it in excellent German translation as well. Last week at the grocery store I tell the clerk who is a friend about a transformative book about the horror of war and as soon as I say the title the lady behind me says “oh lord it is so good but so brutal I could not finish it.” I responded with total understanding. You have to be in good balanced mental condition to read this but it is sooo important IMO. It conveys the mayhem of war better than the best and well-meaning reportage, documentary etc
That's a great way of putting it! Definitely agree about how it conveys "the mayhem of war" better than a lot of other sources. The Kindly Ones certainly isn't for the faint of heart.
@@travelthroughstories some of the journalists covering the war in Ukraine - many from a safe desk at the HQ in the West - should really read this (together with some Chris Hedges !!!): I am nauseated by the headlines in German press pretending to be surprised that soldiers commit heinous "war crimes" ...
Read this book when I was in University. I can’t deny that it is flawed yet it remains quite simply the most memorable reading experience I may have ever had. The tone, the scenes, the narration, everything feels so evocative. Not to mention some incredibly well executed plunges into surrealism in my opinion. But yes not for the faint hearted! Enjoyed your review!
It definitely is a memorable reading experience! The "plunges into surrealism" is a great way to put it - I completely agree that those moments are brilliant. Thanks for watching!
I read it I think 7 years ago. I found it by chance while browsing a bookshelf in a hostel in Liverpool. I started reading it because I have an interest in history and ww2, and the book happened to be in Swedish which is my mother tongue. When I got back home I went straight to the library to borrow it. It fascinated me. Like you said, it's rare that we get the Holocaust from the perspective of the Nazis, and it really is frightening. It has stuck with me, and I think it is an important read.
Just ordered a copy of this book and I cannot wait to read it. Perhaps it’s a bit late, but for any looking to read a (sort of) companion book to The Kindly Ones, I highly recommend “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher Browning. Fascinating book that touches on many of the same questions, from what I can tell.
Interesting - I just looked it up and it looks very relevant. Thanks for the recommendation!
I am in the middle of the audiobook right now. Can't wait to finish it.
Great discussion, Sean. As you describe, the perpetual machinery of evil that humans have created is terrifying and must be confronted if we are to change.
That sense of having to continually wrestle with a narrator who is trying to deflect, persuade, or seduce the reader can be challenging. I can see the parallels to Cormac McCarthy.
Thanks for sharing!
Cheers, Jack
Thank you, Jack! Yes, it's an exhausting book, but I think it's really a necessary perspective to consider even if only to fight against. There are definitely McCarthyian vibes going on here, which makes sense as I'm sure McCarthy had Nazism in mind when constructing the judge.
I loved this book. It took me around 4 months to finish due to the emotional toll it can take on the reader. Some of my favorite parts of this book are not really important to the story but detail the philosophical and ethical aspects of the story. First is the old Jewish man who seeks out Aue while researching in the Caucuses mountains. I won’t ruin what takes place but it’s extremely powerful. Second is the engineer who only wants to build bridges but is tasked with destroying them. He hangs on telling himself there’s still hope to rebuild what’s been destroyed. This book is extremely powerful and very surreal post his head wound. The end was off the wall
I recently finnished this great book in german. I can truely say that this book has changed me and the way how i imagine that time. I often tried to imagine how the Nazis were thinking because my grandfather was part of the SS, thats why this topic haunts me. It might be an ugly book, but it is very nescassary. It has to be ugly, because what happened was very ugly and describing it in any other, less drastic way would downplay the impact of this moral abyss that happened. It is not the fault of Jonathan Littell that this book exists, it is the fault of the Germans that were attracted by the Nazi regime.
One of the most difficult books I’ve ever read…and absolutely powerful and worth reading.
I am halfway through this book. Brutal. I am ....getting thru it.
Very interesting, and very well done! This was super smooth, you clearly don't need to script at all! How is the prose and the writing of the book? Is there anything interesting about the craft of this novel or is it more the uncomfortable ideas that makes it worth engaging with?
Thanks so much, Echo! The issue with no script is that I forget to talk about very basic things like the prose.... haha. I thought the prose was honestly a bit bland. I'd have to guess that it was a stylistic choice to write in a bland prose as it mirrors Aue's cold, banal, and bureaucratic perspective, if that makes sense, but it made the book a bit dry. Some of the descriptions of war, atrocities, and sex were quite...memorable, but for the most part, the narrator's voice is rather underwhelmingly cold and straight-forward. This is all to say that I think the prose matches the subject matter and Max Aue's character quite well, but The Kindly Ones certainly wasn't super interesting at the craft level. Thanks for bringing this up - I definitely meant to mention it!
the audiobook is incredible
That's a big book!
Not sure I'll be in the right head space anytime soon for this one.
Hah! Don't blame you. I'm not sure what the right head space for this book is!
When I finished it, I had to read it again. Intense book.
I always try to read from the german points of view when I can because I have ancestors that took part, not germans but who had to deal with the partisans and I want to know more or less what they felt and saw. This book reflect exactly how someone can feel trap in the killing machine like many of the Max subordinates, common soldiers and even a driver, they can't just say "I don't want to" they have to follow orders. About Max I see him more like an extreamly disturbed person whit no empathy rather than evil, a sick man.
I read this book many years ago and your review is great! I agree with everything you say. I love/hate this book!.
Extraordinary review, very interesting. I'm attracted to reading it, but I cannot prioritize it being it 1000 pages, 300 pages too long and "one of the most disturbing books" that you and many have read. Thanks for the analysis for the rest of us. By the way, I arrived to this book because of the war in Ukraine.
Thank you for watching! Reading this during the war in Ukraine is especially disturbing as so much of the book focuses on that region. It's definitely a book that is worth your time, but you need to be in the right headspace for it, so I don't blame anyone for not prioritizing it.
I REALLY want to read this perspective now. Thanks dude.
Thanks man! It's a strange but interesting perspective. The book is really worth it though.
Love this book! Was actually just thinking about it this morning!
I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time. It's definitely the kind of book that stays with you!
Psychopathy and pathological narcissists are v common in reality. What does that say about our species? You raise very important questions here.
I wonder, at what year was this memoir supposedly written? I mean, it is never detailed in the book, when the main character writes his memoirs. I think Vietnam War is mentioned by him, so it must be written in the 1970s, the earliest.
Makes me want to read it. I have read Child of God and it did not occur to me that it might be controversial. I guess people who cannot countenance how people are will have a problem. But for me part of the reason is precisely because l can enter the worlds of people and circumstances outside my own experience.
Damn. Sounds intense as heck. Pretty sure people have talked about this around me and I literally always assume they’re talking about Sandman.
It's incredibly intense - it left me exhausted. Haha. I need to read more of Sandman. I've only read one or two volumes. I just haven't been able to find cheap copies and never bothered to get it from the library. Is it worth reading? (Also, God help the person who accidentally picks this book up thinking it's a Gaiman work...)
@@travelthroughstories sandman is incredible stuff. I bought the absolute editions when they go on sale; they get quite low sometimes and are totally worth it. Oversized, recoloured, and many have interesting extras, such as one of the most famous ones broken down into script form and art direction. Not much comes close to it.
@@SpringboardThought Good to know - I'll keep my eye out for those ones! I almost bought the omnibus editions when they were on sale a few years ago, but didn't. What I read of the series, I loved, so I hope I can find them soon.
@@travelthroughstories omnibuses are good too, but reading oversized collections are the ultimate experience. The first couple editions are recoloured, and easier to read because they sharpened the text with the update. I think it’s worth it, if you’re patient. In Canada they hover around $160 MSRP, I didn’t pay more than $90 for any of them, so they drop fairly regularly, I think.
@@SpringboardThought Awesome. I'll add them to the top of my search list. That's one of the reasons I haven't picked them up yet - I was never sure which edition was the best. So thanks for clarifying that!
Seems like a very interesting one. Great review!
Thanks for watching!
Great review
I read/watched quite a lot of fiction and non-fiction about the holocaust and WW2, so I thought I could handle this book. Eventually I finished it, but was nauseous most of the time and had really detailed and surreal nightmares in the months it took me to get through it.
I'm interested to hear from you and others in the comments here, why was his perversion such a big part of the plot? why was it so detailed? It seemed contradictory to the underlying claim that Aue, as a representative of nazis, was "just and average joe" caught up in the monstrosities.
Completely agree that Aue's constant perversions undermined the idea that he was just an ordinary guy, swept up Nazism. I'm not exactly sure what to do with it, to be honest, other than suggest that perhaps Littell was trying to link Aue's perversion with the long history that resulted in both him and the Nazis. That is, neither came ex nihilo - both are predicated on a long history of the West that goes back to the Greeks, which this book's title and structure suggest are fundamental to understanding Nazism. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts though.
@@travelthroughstories
Because nazism is transgression. "Average Joes" (probably raised christian - "thou shall not kill") who would have repressed their pulsions and stayed ordinary in a "normal" society were given the opportunity - even more, it was expected of them - to kill civilians in large numbers. Once such a massive transgression occurs with the blessings of the power in place, why stop there? Everything becomes possible without any repercussions. Morality flights out the window and the gates are wide open for every kind of transgression and perversion to be acted upon with impunity.
Good point about 'other human beings being other human beings'. It's a truism: 'I belong to the same species as such-and-such exemplar of evil', but one that tends to immediately demand clarification and walking back so as to preempt being possibly misconstrued as a slippery, backdoor rhetorical maneuver. A lot of the time empathy (as opposed to sympathy, by definition crucially different) registers as a sign of creeping intellectual pollution. Going by the impression I get of more prosaically unlikeable protagonists being a huge problem and hurdle for a lot of readers, I think culture is likely to remain largely hostile to books like The Kindly Ones for simply being too perverse.
For sure. It does seem to be an increasing fact that modern readers struggle more and more with separating the worldviews/actions of a book's characters with the larger points that the book is exploring. It's certainly easier to scoff at reading this behemoth because of its contents rather than critically dealing with Aue's character.
First one here🙋🏾♀️ keep up ur amazing reviews
Thanks so much!
Love this book!
It certainly leaves an impression! Hah.
@@travelthroughstories it’s one of those books you’ll never forget
Just finished the audiobook. The performer did amazing with the German and French pronunciation. I'm going to gibe it a second listen but there is a ton of deep historical lore hidden in there. I could've done without the graphic sexual imagery, the German sexual imagery.
Agreed that this is a book that demands (and deserves) a reread! There's a ton in there that absolutely went over my head on my first read and only read anyways.
This an amazing review
Thank you!
Now I can’t but help to stare at his shirt
The soldiers are (almost always) just propaganda-prone people or careerists that grab the "job" opportunity. They get a bit of the blame for not thinking critically.
BTW I think you'll like The disconnected by Oguz Atay.
I'm sure there are plenty of those kinds of soldiers, though I know too many veterans to make a general criticism like that. I've heard so many good things about The Disconnected (mainly from Book Shore) - the second I can get my hands on it, I'll read it for sure!
@@travelthroughstories You can zlib it, it's not in print :/
@@ivailopetrov2827 I thought I saw someone from the publisher mention that they were working on a new translation.. I could be wrong though. Apparently there are a few libraries nearby that have it - I may have to pick it up!
How are you doing mr sean iam new subscriber Arabic lady citizen since Christmas 2019 I began to subscribe to British and American TH-cam channels we are as foreigners subscribers as overseas students want to increase our cultural level improve our English language as well literature lovers too I just found out last month there are book tubes channels it’s great ideas to show people books and encourage them to read learn new information can you imagine iam subscriber to dr Barry vann he is retried dean 19 episodes only about surnames in USA if you please I looked up for your name it’s Irish origin means gracious or gift from god my name too is Turkish origin means Nobel lady as princess I gathered key points about famous book you mentioned briefly here it’s kindly ones is 2006 historical fiction novel written in French by American born author Jonathan littell .
This is an outstanding fictional history all be it horrific subject.