Promise me that you will at least read until page 100 (out of 1,000 pages). Please also assure me that The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell is not the first book you have read about the Holocaust. Some readers found it subversive, some unreadable, others absolutely brilliant. And people are still debating.

I’m not sure I have ever hated a character as much as I hated Littell’s protagonist. Perhaps Sol, the 6-year-old character of Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines – an obnoxious, crude, and frightening child, sexually aroused by violence and torture… In the same way I had questioned the value of imagining  such a twisted child, I felt deeply uncomfortable with the extreme cynicism of  Jonathan Littell’s creature. He is one of those despicable monsters that you study from as far away as possible, one whose real-life alter ago you hope you will never meet.

In The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell (son of Robert Littell, also a writer – I love the father but this will be for another post) slips into the skin of a manipulative and unscrupulous SS officer, convinced of the validity of the extermination of the Jews, but also sure he will win his reader over with his cause. Dripping with arrogance and sarcasm, he narrates in detail from the genesis of the Final Solution to the fall of Berlin in 1945,  his heinous quest for more responsibility in the Holocaust.

How did I ever come to terms with spending that much time with such a detestable person?  Reading his inanities seemed initially a lack of respect to all the Holocaust victims. For the first time I wondered if any topic at all might be permissible when viewed through the lens of creative license… I wondered if The Kindly Ones should not be forbidden, or at least limited to a well-warned audience. I wondered if the risk to leave such a scumbag preaching his convictions was not too high; if some incredulous people would not emerge from the book convinced by his theses…

I closed the book twice before deciding that I could not avoid reading The Kindly Ones; that I had to. In effect, this novel is an element to consider in our search to understand the abominable. Somehow Jonathan Littell joins Hannah Arendt** in her demonstration statement that evil is nothing extraordinary. But none of the transcripts of the Eichmann trial, none of the historians’ documents, none of the rare executioners depositions, will ever truly lift the veil on the Nazi’s daily motivations. The executioners’ words are much too edited to have any value. The strength of the novel genre is to illustrate what even the most elaborated documentaries will never show, a forum by which to say and describe when no image and no witness are available. And only in the minuscule, despicable trivialities of this deviant life, does the banality of evil hits us in all its horror and its mediocrity.

I am convinced that The Kindly Ones will become a classic over time, one of those books one opens not out of interest but by necessity. To continue to learn, to remember that the unbearable is close,within us, within reach…

LITTELL Jonathan, The Kindly Ones, 2009, Harper, New York

* HUSTON Nancy , Fault Lines, 2008, Thorndike Press, New York

** ARENDT Hannah , Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963, Vicking, New York