Sophia C. reviewed on + 289 more book reviews
I received my copy with a note saying "great, disturbing, strange book" and I must agree that The Kindly Ones is all of the above. At over 900 pages, it's an epic fictional memoir of WWII from the perspective of Maximilien Aue, a young doctor of law who becomes a SS officer that slips away to become a lace manufacturer in France. If you like your books to be tightly edited, you most likely won't enjoy this book: it's full of long paragraphs, long chapters, and lots of details of Aue's professional life. The chart on SS ranks in the back is an invaluable guide. The parts that focus on his private life border on fantastical. Note it also won an award for literary bad sex. However, American-born Littell's telling the story of the war from a thinking Nazi's perspective can be a mesmerizing military adventure and a morally challenging mirror held up to the reader. I'm glad the list of 1001 books you must read before you die led me to Les Bienveillantes, originally in French, whose title refers to the Furies of Greek mythology.
