It's been a decade since I've read the Kindly Ones, and here are the few fragments of the impressions still left from teenage me, after a week of compulsive reading. It was, in a way, recommended to me by official educators. An excerpt from the beginning of the book, where Max Aue describes his post-war life as a business owner, was put in my History textbook and somehow captured my imagination. I simply went into the school library the next day and they had it, as it had made a big splash in France ten years earlier. I often remember more clearly the story of how I met a good book - especially if it was by chance - than the actual contents themselves.

We follow higher-official Max Aue, a clearly fictional protagonist, that enables Littell to embark us in a journey to every corner of the entire world of national-socialism, leaving no stone unturned. The sheer abundance of historic details paint such a realistic picture that for the first time I could fathom the scope of what happened, something that my history lessons, or reading the lived experience of one single real human - except maybe Viktor Klemperer, but I read LTI years later, and since I was 15 it is this historical novel that has colored my knowledge of the facts of the Nazi regime - couldn't make me understand.

The hero itself is more blurry to me. I remember him cold, analytical, factual and unaffected by the horrors that he sees and participates in. Both French and German, he was eminently cultivated and was my first foray in understanding the level of sophistication the Nazis deployed in their justification of racism. While his character didn't seem believable, I could feel he represented something close to the truth of the bureaucrats of a genocidal State, an allegory of the Banality of evil of Arendt, except such evil cannot actually be banal, and Littell accomplishes this by giving Max strong sexual perversions. Although at the time I remember being amused about how shocking they were, if I were to read the book again, knowing a bit more about sex, life and psychoanalysis, I'd see beyond the shock factor and I think the psychology of the character would give new depth to my reading, although some parts - the sausage - will probably still be too lurid to not make me laugh.

The book is one of the longest and densest I've ever read - 1300 pages in softcover. But it is an expertly written page-turner, an enthralling dive into the worse of humanity, going from almost pornographic descriptions of horrific violence to pages of minute details about Caucasian linguistics. Hard to recommend a book about confident genocidal folly to most of my friends, but I'm just waiting for someone to ask me about the best historical novel I've ever read. I bought the actual book years later, but I'm almost afraid of reading it again, so it sits on my shelf, gathering dust.

The kindly ones

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