|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
Review
“Almost indescribable in its complexity and achievement: narratively powerful and hallucinatory.”
— Maclean’s
“A staggering triumph….”
— Le Monde
“A great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come.”
— The Times (London)
“The Kindly Ones is a work of art in its conception, admirable in what it sets out to do and in how much it accomplishes. . . . An important work. In that it keeps its eye on the unwavering idea of what it is to be human, it’s masterful.”
— Globe and Mail
From the Hardcover edition.
— Maclean’s
“A staggering triumph….”
— Le Monde
“A great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come.”
— The Times (London)
“The Kindly Ones is a work of art in its conception, admirable in what it sets out to do and in how much it accomplishes. . . . An important work. In that it keeps its eye on the unwavering idea of what it is to be human, it’s masterful.”
— Globe and Mail
From the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
“Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.”
Dr. Max Aue, the man at the heart of Jonathan Littell’s stunning and controversial novel The Kindly Ones, personifies the evils of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Highly educated and cultured, he was an ambitious SS officer, a Nazi and mass murderer who was in the upper echelons of the Third Reich. He tells us of his experience during the war. He was present at Auschwitz and Babi Yar, witnessed the battle of Stalingrad, and survived the fall of Berlin — receiving a medal from Hitler personally in the last days of Nazi Germany.
Long after the war, he is living a comfortable bourgeois life in France, married with two children, managing a lace factory. And now, having evaded justice, he speaks out, giving a precise and accurate record of his life. The tone of his account is detached, lapidary, and for the most part unrepentant, whether he is describing his participation in mass murder on the Eastern Front, his bureaucratic investigations of labour productivity in the death camps, his casual murder of civilians as he tries to break through Russian lines towards the end of the war, or his fervid and convoluted relationship with his twin sister.
Over its course, by entwining Aue’s life with those of historical figures such as Eichmann and Speer, Himmler and indeed Hitler, The Kindly Ones comes to depict the entire architecture of Nazism — from its grandest intellectual pretensions to its most minute, most chilling managerial details and executions. The Kindly Ones presents — with unprecedented realism, meticulous research that is both fascinating and compelling, and brilliant literary accomplishment — the greatest horrors imaginable.
“War and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers,” Aue says. In the same way, this powerfully affecting, powerfully challenging book confronts the reader with the most profound questions about history, morality, and art without offering any easy resolution. Written originally in French, and published now in English for the first time, The Kindly Ones has already sold to date well over a million copies in Europe. In France it won two prestigious prizes, including the Goncourt, and has been compared to War and Peace and other great classics of literature.
From the Hardcover edition.
Dr. Max Aue, the man at the heart of Jonathan Littell’s stunning and controversial novel The Kindly Ones, personifies the evils of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Highly educated and cultured, he was an ambitious SS officer, a Nazi and mass murderer who was in the upper echelons of the Third Reich. He tells us of his experience during the war. He was present at Auschwitz and Babi Yar, witnessed the battle of Stalingrad, and survived the fall of Berlin — receiving a medal from Hitler personally in the last days of Nazi Germany.
Long after the war, he is living a comfortable bourgeois life in France, married with two children, managing a lace factory. And now, having evaded justice, he speaks out, giving a precise and accurate record of his life. The tone of his account is detached, lapidary, and for the most part unrepentant, whether he is describing his participation in mass murder on the Eastern Front, his bureaucratic investigations of labour productivity in the death camps, his casual murder of civilians as he tries to break through Russian lines towards the end of the war, or his fervid and convoluted relationship with his twin sister.
Over its course, by entwining Aue’s life with those of historical figures such as Eichmann and Speer, Himmler and indeed Hitler, The Kindly Ones comes to depict the entire architecture of Nazism — from its grandest intellectual pretensions to its most minute, most chilling managerial details and executions. The Kindly Ones presents — with unprecedented realism, meticulous research that is both fascinating and compelling, and brilliant literary accomplishment — the greatest horrors imaginable.
“War and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers,” Aue says. In the same way, this powerfully affecting, powerfully challenging book confronts the reader with the most profound questions about history, morality, and art without offering any easy resolution. Written originally in French, and published now in English for the first time, The Kindly Ones has already sold to date well over a million copies in Europe. In France it won two prestigious prizes, including the Goncourt, and has been compared to War and Peace and other great classics of literature.
From the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Kindly Ones,
This review is from: The Kindly Ones (Paperback)
The massive size of this work may initially be discouraging but onegets quickly absorbed in the action. This book will be of most interest to the students of the Nazi era. It is meticously researched and some details are unbelieavably brutal and macabre. If read before bedtime, vivid nightmares may follow. Ultimately, though, the author gets the point across: how the most unimaginable atrocities can become just "a job that needs to be done." Even to people who adore Bach, read Schiller and would not hurt a fly. Our intuition says that they should have known better. But after being battered for nearly 1,000 pages of this, I was astonished how my mind was sliding into a similar frame: Oh well, that's too bad, but got to move on." Very interesting. And scary.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Long, pornographic, rambling and disgusting.,
By
This review is from: The Kindly Ones (Hardcover)
I don't know how to review a novel that alternates between the main character masturbating over his incestous relationship with his sister and philosophical monologues about the nature of evil.I've struggled through Naked Lunch (which at least didn't make a pre-text at being a historical novel) but Littell lost me when I realized that this book IS pretentious. A Greek tragedy made out of the holocaust? What was a historical fiction suddenly turns into a Gene Wolfe-like tale to be puzzled out at the end? And Gene Wolfe it is - and a bit of Clockwork Orange. Which got me thinking... Even the dream sequences are remarkable similar to Severian's, the unreliable narrator, the exploration of sexual relationships without a moral compass point... Gene Wolfe wrote this novel a long time ago, and Anthony Burgess made a helluvalot more convincing amoral classical music lover. The novel is painstakenly researched, however, and any criticism of a novel that deals with the holocaust seems wrong, but this book doesn't work as a novel. As an eyewitness account of many Hebrews being slaughtered it is a worthy document. Read at your peril.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Kindly Ones,
By
This review is from: The Kindly Ones (Hardcover)
Although written as a novel, this book is historically factual, both from a genocidal and narrative account of World War II. It is written in a style that keeps the reader spellbound from beginning to end. It makes one pause to consider the human race's capabilites for evil and indifference in the face of mass murder and the motivations of those involved in crimes against humanity. I believe what we have here is a book that is destined to become a masterpiece.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
