Littel’s big book may be a masterpiece

Littel’s big book may be a masterpiece

Posted on May 10th, 2009 by Christopher Guerin

I’ve read only the first 200 pages, just 1/5th, of Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly Ones, but so far it has all the art, seriousness, and structure of a great, great novel. The New York Times‘ hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani, in a bitter (even for her) condemnation of the book, calls The Kindly Ones, “a voyeuristic spectacle — like watching a slasher film with lots of close-ups of blood and guts” and “a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks, pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies.” She couldn’t be more wrong.

Yes, there’s plenty of death in this new addition to Holocaust literature, but I would not call it “blood and guts” or “voyeuristic” or “pointless.” How does one describe 39,000 Jews killed at Babi Yar from the point of view of one of those in charge, one of the murderers? One can neither honor the dead nor attempt to understand the motivations and the emotions of the murderers without the kind of clear-eyed, simple, and restrained (however voluminous) prose that Littel has assembled here. The only alternative, it seems to me, is not to attempt to write about it at all.

But this is not a book solely about how the Nazis, the Waffen SS in particular, perpetrated the “Final Solution.” It is not a documentary, but a novel, which traces the experiences of a single SS officer from his time on the Russian front to Auschwitz and beyond the end of the war.

Specifically so that we do not excuse the narrator on the grounds of being either an animal or a madman (though at times he is both), Littel has created a flesh and blood character, brilliant and complex. He is bisexual, incestuous, and possibly matricidal not because the author wishes to push his narrator (as well as his narrative) to every extreme, for the sake of extremity, but because he intends to make him (and the story he is telling) as compelling as possible. He is Alex from A Clockwork Orange without the jokes — a less-elegant Humbert Humbert of genocide.

Perhaps I’ll feel differently about this book by the time I’ve finished it, weeks from now — if so, I’ll let you know — but for now I can’t wait to get back to it.

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Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.