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Favourite Books of 2009: The Kindly Ones and Suite Francaise

If books don't grab me right away, I move on to the next.  One exception:  The Kindly Ones (in French Les Bienviellantes,) by Jonathan Littell.

The Kindly Ones is groundbreaking.  The Jewish author chooses the first person voice of a Nazi bureaucrat to tell the story, written originally in French.  The narrator begins as a brilliant homosexual academic forced by events to make a choice between arrest for homosexual activities or a post in the SS.  After choosing the SS, the vortex of nazism pulls him in deeper and deeper until he reaches the core.  As we follow his journey to the dark centre, we experience the banalization of mass murder, how intelligent people rationalize kiling others, and the inevitability of the narrator's insanity. First depicted as the natural revulsion towards murder, revulsion turns to compliance mixed with a will to succeed within a system, to get the next promotion, to do well at a job. Compliance becomes eagerness and eagerness grows chapter by chapter into a sharp and icy intentionality that every  genocide requires of its masters.

The 900-page book was awarded two of the most prestigious French literary awards, the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française and the Prix Goncourt in 2006, and as of December 2009 it was translated into seventeen languages.  I knew Jonathan Littell's family when I lived in France.  His father, Robert Littell,wrote for Newsweek Magazine and went on to author a stack of spy novels including, most recently, The Stalin Epigram

Elder Littell lives in the Dordogne region of Southern France in a renovated chateau and I got to spend a few notable evenings with the family talking about politics, writing, and what it meant to be an American expatriate.  I remember seeing Jonathan, who was then about nineteen-years-old coming in an out.  So when I heard he'd written a book that was a best-seller throughout Europe, I grabbed it and stuck with it through many of its difficult twists and turns.  It's rare that a book blows me away anymore, but this one did.  It charts the deterioration of the human soul and left me more convinced than ever how susceptible every human being is to going down that terrible path.

How I got through all those pages: I skipped through some of the thicker (boring) sections of (endless) historical data about Nazism to get back to the story. (Was there an editor on the project?)

 I was underwhelmed by the book's final chapters. The author was thirty when the book came out, so I'm going to say he lacked the maturity to know how to end what he'd started.  He'd accomplished so much in the story, the finale disappointed the expectation of brilliance set up in the first three-quarters of the book, but it didn't diminish for me, the novel's overall impact.

While we're on the subject of the Holocaust, another favourite recent read of mine was Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky.    The title refers to a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian Jewish origin. Tragically, the stunning project was thwarted by the author's deportation to Auschwitz.  The miracle is that the first part got written and, thanks to her children, survived.  Némirovsky was arrested as a Jew in July of 1942 and detained at Pithiviers and then Auschwitz, where they said she died of typhus, but it has since been proven that she was sent to the gas chambers. The notebook containing the two novels was preserved by her daughters who were hidden during the war, but they didn't really look at them until 1998. They were published in 2004.

Nemirovsky was  an established novelist and a convert to Catholicism when the war broke out.  Her depiction of life in Paris during the occupation and various evacuations is done with a gentle grace that is less confrontative than Littell's novel and yet equally as disturbing.  We see how easily society breaks down under pressure and the psychological dynamics of occupation as it weighs on human relationships.  With her skill at plot and character development, Nemirovsky's  Price and Prejudice of World War II equals Littell's breakthrough novel in its power and impact.

 

 

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