The Kindly Ones
1st Edition
Published on 10. November 2009
992 pages
978-1-4090-7597-4 (ISBN)
Description
Dr Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, looks back on the Eastern Front, Stalingrad, and the death camps as Nazi Germany falls.
Set during the Second World War on the Eastern Front and in Berlin, The Kindly Ones is narrated by Dr Max Aue, who is both a cultivated intellectual and a participant in Nazi atrocities.
From Stalingrad to the death camps and the nightmarish fall of Berlin, The Kindly Ones places Max Aue among figures including Eichmann, Himmler, Goering, Speer and Hitler.
As the Third Reich falls, Max reflects on the career that took him through mass murder and bureaucratic power, insisting on his own version of events.
Set during the Second World War on the Eastern Front and in Berlin, The Kindly Ones is narrated by Dr Max Aue, who is both a cultivated intellectual and a participant in Nazi atrocities.
From Stalingrad to the death camps and the nightmarish fall of Berlin, The Kindly Ones places Max Aue among figures including Eichmann, Himmler, Goering, Speer and Hitler.
As the Third Reich falls, Max reflects on the career that took him through mass murder and bureaucratic power, insisting on his own version of events.
Reviews / Votes
It is a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping...a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come -- Anthony Beevor * The Times * An extraordinarily powerful novel that leads the stunned reader on a journey through some of the darkest recesses of European history...reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly important, now as ever * Observer * Everybody's talking about it...erudite, pitiless and mesmerising * Financial Times * A compelling and savage tale, with a cold dispassionate eye that never flinches from the raw reality of mass-murder... a serious attempt to describe the terrors of the Nazi regime * Independent * The book rises magnificently to its own occasions, building out of its fact-crammed but stately sentences a vast and phosphorescent tableaux vivants seething with Dantesque detail * Guardian * Nor is The Kindly Ones only a great work of history and reflection, but full of striking literary writing: consummate adagios of landscape painting; lovely images and observations...even touches of macabre humour...inescapably impressive -- Carole Angier * Literary Review * Its account of Nazi cruelty, chaos and callousness has never been surpassed in fiction... Unforgettable...magnificent * London Review of Books * The force and cool detachment with which author Jonathan Littell describes the physical realities of war and mass murder are searing. He has spent years on his research and clings closely to the historical record but this fictional presentation brings the accounts horrifically alive -- Mary Brodbin * Socialist Review * [It] provides us with a remarkable, and multidimensional guide to human evil... the work itself is, above all, a tremendous argument for fiction -- Michael Gove * The Times * It's a compelling and provocative novel -- Charlotte Stretch * Time Out *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
File size
1,01 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-4090-7597-4 (9781409075974)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Jonathan Littell was born in 1967 in New York of American parents and brought up and educated mainly in France. This novel, originally published in France as Les Bienveillantes, became a bestseller and won the coveted Prix Goncourt and the Academie Francaise's Prix de Litterature. Previously he worked for the humanitarian agency, Action contre la faim, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He now lives in Spain.
