I've been reading about Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, the novel that is a sensation in Europe, but has received, at best, mixed reviews in this country. As a general rule I don't comment on books I have not read out of respect for the author. However, although I intend to read this book at some point, I will violate my usual rule and offers some pre-reading observations.
I feel comfortable doing this because the book has received so much press that its overall shape has been exposed and I doubt very much that it will turn out to be very different from what I expect it to be. In addition, I am writing a novel that covers much the same ground, so I am motivated to offer my views.
From what I have read the book's main character, Maximilien Aue, is an SS officer who offers first hand accounts of the Final Solution. A minor criticism is that Littell has him move around from killing ground to killing ground, so as to present a full, and critics say, accurate portrayal of the attempt to exterminate European Jews. A more substantial objection to the book is that Aue is a throughly despicable human being who besides participating in genocide commits matricide and incest.
Although critics more postively disposed toward the book insist that the admittedly evil Aue provides us with the full stench of the horror. This is an interesting idea, but one I must reject. The enduring question of the Holocaust is how could seemingly ordinary individuals take part in crimes that beggar the moral imagination. To create a representative Nazi like Aue begs that question because he is clearly not in any sense of the word ordinary. Matricide is surely not commonplace, nor is incest. Combined with his obvious pleasure in his day job, killng Jews, Aue seems a monster, but we know that Nazis while committing monstrous acts were not otherwise monsters.
More later.