Reviewed by: Writing the Holocaust Today: Critical Perspectives on Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones ed. by Aurélie Barjonet, Liran Razinsky Jakob Lothe Writing the Holocaust Today: Critical Perspectives on Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, ed. Aurélie Barjonet and Liran Razinsky. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2012. 265pp. As first-hand testimonies of the Holocaust are becoming increasingly rare, we need to seriously consider how we can preserve the memory of this appalling historical event. All the essays of this important volume, competently edited by Aurélie Barjonet and Liran Razinsky, discuss variants of this question. Moreover, all fourteen contributors link, albeit in different ways, the question to the two following ones asked by the editors in their fine Introduction: “What potential may literature have in terms of understanding atrocities, extreme human behavior, and even ideology? And how can one fictionalize an event [the Holocaust] so abundantly documented and researched yet so fundamentally absent and incomprehensible?” (9). These questions touch on, and in one sense precisely indicate, the main reason why the novel discussed in the volume, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006), will probably prove one of the most significant contributions to the genre of the novel published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Probing the limits of fictional representation, The Kindly Ones is a highly original, daring work that, distressing and even irritating as it may be, forces the reader to think through important issues pertaining to narrative fiction — both generally and with a particular view to the vexed issue of fictional representations of the Holocaust. If one constituent element of the novel is the genre’s continuing development and elasticity, The Kindly Ones is such a novel — innovative, daring, challenging, and provocative. For Mikhail M. Bakhtin, the novel is a dynamic genre that, ruthlessly exploiting and incorporating elements of other genres, is subject to constant changes and is engaged in a continuing exploration of its own resources. The Kindly Ones is definitely a novel in this Bakhtinian sense. One notable asset of the volume under review is that it presents the reader with a range of the features of Littell’s novel that serve to make it challenging and thought-provoking. A further asset is that several of the contributors address constituent aspects of Littell’s novel that not only activate but frequently turn on ethical issues. Such issues are raised on virtually every page of The Kindly [End Page 196] Ones, prompting questions such as: what kind of moral authority is represented by, and extractable from, a narrative text whose one and only narrator, Max Aue, is a Nazi perpetrator? How can the text’s moral authority be established in, and through, a variant of first-person narration that is clearly biased and possibly unreliable? How do we as readers meet the challenge of identifying, responding to, and reflecting on the ethics of this kind of fictional narrative? The collection is sensibly divided into five parts that identify, reflect, and discuss a range of the most pressing issues — including, as indicated already, generic and ethical ones — presented in the novel and variously addressed in its reception: “The Book’s Provocation,” “The Perpetrator’s Point of View,” “Memory & Intertexts,” “Historical Perspectives,” and “The Reception of the Novel.” The Kindly Ones has provoked, and continues to provoke, many readers in many different ways; and in the first part Georges Nivat, Peter Kuon, Liran Razinsky, and Cyril Aslanov discuss several of these provocations. While good observations are made in all four essays, I shall comment briefly on key points made by Kuon and Razinsky. Discussing the scene in the novel in which Aue witnesses the hanging of two Bolshevik Jews, Kuon notes that while the first part of the scene is historically correct, the sentence in which Littell highlights Aue’s fascination with the engorged penis of one of the victims reveals a problematic tension between Aue as reliable chronicler of historical events and Aue as unreliable autobiographer guided by his pornographic gaze. If, for Kuon, Littell’s ethical position is unclear because it seems to incorporate elements of both these aspects of Aue’s narration, the narrative presentation of the relationship between...
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Dec 18, 2015
Luiza Lusvarghi 
Open Access
