Boy oh boy did The New Republic hate it:
A review cannot convey how deeply unpleasant the experience of reading The Kindly Ones is. This is one of the most repugnant books I have ever read.
Literary Review has a more charitable, if confusing take:
This book has divided the world. The French love it, and gave it not only the Prix Goncourt but the Académie Française’s Prix de la Littérature as well. The British are split - Antony Beevor loved it, Peter Kemp hated it. The survivor-writer Jorge Semprún admired it; Claude Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, first hated it, then changed his mind. Most Americans and Canadians loathe it.
Why? And who is right and wrong?
That should be a naïve question, since wildly differing responses to the same book are perfectly normal. But here there is, I think, a right and a wrong answer, though not simple ones. Those who admire The Kindly Ones are right, but those who loathe it are not completely wrong. It is half a work of genius and half a work of gratuitous perversion.
The first thing to note is that it is not in any ordinary sense a novel, despite its publisher’s designation. It is 992 pages and dense with argument; hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of characters march across its pages. As many readers will know by now, it comprises the memories of an ex-SS officer whose career took him to all the worst places of the war: Babi Yar, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Berlin in the last days, including Hitler’s bunker. What is extraordinary about it is the minute and mountainous detail of these events, the making of them as ordinary to us as it was to those who lived through them, by the sheer weight of facts and thoughts, and the time it takes to read them.
A novel follows a handful of characters through a handful of events - few enough so that we can remember them and care. In The Kindly Ones we meet all the people - soldiers, victims, politicians, bureaucrats - whom Maximilian Aue comes across in the course of five years of war; you’d need to be Funes el Memorioso to remember them all. If The Kindly Ones were a novel, therefore, it would be a bad one. But it is not a novel. It is a work of history - animated by Aue’s hate and fear (he has no love, or only one, as he often tells us), but a work of history nonetheless. That is one of the reasons why Antony Beevor admires it; and why I do too. If you want to know what mass murdering was like, from the point of view of the perpetrators - the anguish and the ordinariness, the in-fighting and career-building, the reasons with which they deluded themselves, as men do in every war, just and monstrously unjust alike (the trick is to tell the difference) - read The Kindly Ones. If you want to know what Stalingrad was like for them - how Germans starved and froze there as their victims did in Auschwitz, how they had to wrap their penises in cloth to pee, while others held their frost-bitten hands in the warm stream - read The Kindly Ones. If you want to read some of the best-expressed, most terrible arguments about why people become sadists, or for ‘there but for the grace of God go we’ - read The Kindly Ones.
I'm not totally buying the excuse that TKO (ha) isn't strictly a novel but "a work of history." That seems hopelessly broad. I looked at it at Barnes and Noble the other day, and I got the impression that it was a novel. It sure smelled like one.
(I found the Literary Review article on Cynical-C, and it made me laugh that it called it "A review of The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell from Literary Review," because it sounds like Littel wrote the review himself)
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