I read this in French when the reviews started coming out raving about it. I dont intend to read the English translation: once in any language is enough. But I found that I could not put it down once started. It is astonishing, compelling, revolting and, alas in all too many places, boring. As I was reading it, I was constantly reminded of Jonah Goldberg's reminder of the physicality of the Holocaust: blood and brains spattering all over the murderers: you get the point. It struck me that this is where Littell is taking the reader: into the physicality of the heart of darkness. And there is a lot of that in this novel: too much, or just enough? I guess it depends on how you take it. Kakutani in the NYT didnt take it at all well. But I think still there is merit in Littells approach: this is perhaps the thing that art can do best, deliver a whalloping punch to the gut. And that the novel certainly achieves. On the downside, it does tend to go on and on; there are long passages describing Aue's dreams or hallucinations or whatever that dont succeed well at all, IMHO. I found myself skimming these passages after close reading of the first one. They dont seem to add much insight into Aue's character, psychology or motives.
The Kindly Ones will certainly not be to everyone's taste and Littell took a huge risk in tackling such a sensitive and explosive topic in the way he did. I have been haunted by this novel from time to time since I read it, but I dont regret it. There is a case to be made that it's garbage, but in the end, for me, I found it deeply illuminating in places, and ultimately satisfying as art. Human evil remains a mystery here and that is as at should be.

I read this pompous and peculiar book in its German translation, "Die Wohlgesinnten." Suffice it to say I won't be reading yet another translation of this quite dreadfully written pot-boiler. As "Les bienveillantes," "The Kindly Ones" walked off with the Prix Goncourt and other laurels at the disposal of Parisian grandees, but not since the French elevated Jerry Lewis to the level of auteur demi-God have they so fallen for the pretensions of an American on the make. Littell's countrymen are likely to recognize "The Kindly Ones" as the exercise in self-promotion that it is, and they may even admire its creator's moxie. The book focuses on an SS-man with sophisticated tastes who somehow manages to show up at all the five-star atrocities of World War II, reducing that bloodbath to something of a ghoulish, amusement-park-ride-style spectacle. Moreover, behind Littell's odd decision to make this monster a homosexual seems to lurk the hateful "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex" (a bestseller in Littell's boyhood), with its appalling claim that gay men made particularly apt Nazi torturers. Littell himself has gone out of his way to make himself seem the bearer of a weird and threatening amoral artistic credo, calculated to shock, for example by making the gross and provocative assertion that to him, the corpses adorning his text in abundance are just "grammatical forms" ("die Leiche ist eine grammatikalische Form," the German press reported him as saying). Littell sees himself as coming in the line of the old masters, for whom, he says, carnage was just a matter of color and texture. (Tell it to Goya.) The triviality, not to say cruelty, of such remarks is a good index of the worthlessness of this work, which disguises its sensationalistic pointlessness behind an immense wall of half-digested articles from the encyclopedia.