The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
Published 2006 · 997 pages · 400,039 words · about 42 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, War Fiction
How hard is The Kindly Ones to read?
The Kindly Ones scores 69 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 66 out of 100
- Littell's Aue uses a formal, educated register studded with German ranks, Wehrmacht jargon, Latin tags and quotations from Plato, Schopenhauer and Sophocles. The terms are mostly institutional rather than archaic, so it reads closer to Ishiguro's formal clarity than to Joyce or Pynchon, though the acronyms and Nazi vocabulary add real friction.
- Sentence structure: 66 out of 100
- Many paragraphs run for pages as a single flow, and the Babi Yar ravine passage chains clause after clause with commas. Dialogue scenes are clipped and clear, but the overall demand is closer to Bolaño than to Faulkner or James.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Aue's reasoning about guilt, the state, total war and the Hegelian view of war floats above concrete events, but it is anchored in vivid scenes: the dying woman, the flooded ditch, the camera in his head. That makes it more concrete than Dostoevsky's philosophical monologue yet well above a typical war novel.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- The pages pack units, chains of command, historical names, statistics, topography and dates, from Reichenau and Jeckeln to Oberländer's seminar on Ukrainian nationalists. This encyclopedic density rivals the historical load of War and Peace or Doctor Zhivago.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- Aue narrates in the first person with chilling plainness, yet withholds his family history and nature, and rationalizes what the reader must see through. Like Humbert, he demands that you read against his self-justifications, and like Nick Carraway his bias shapes everything.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- Lace, the piano, the caterpillar, flies, the Leontius passage and the dream of the woman telling him to write form a steady web of images. Aue's hallucinated arm shooting on its own at Babi Yar is a striking example. The symbols are clear rather than hidden, closer to Gatsby than to Ulysses.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- The gap between Aue's calm civility and what he describes is vast: he complains of constipation while counting the dead per minute. He claims no remorse yet describes shaking and vomiting. The reader must constantly separate what he says from what the book shows, as with Humbert Humbert.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- The prologue tells us that Aue survived and prospered, so the plot's outcome is known, but his motives, his desires and what he feels remain unresolved. His claim to have "nothing to justify" invites doubt. The excerpt ends mid-massacre, leaving moral judgment open.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- A frame narrative of the postwar factory director holds the long chronological memoir, which is broken by flashbacks to the 1930s, childhood and dreams. The 'Allemandes' title and the suite structure add formal design, yet the main thread stays linear, so it is less fragmented than 2666.
How The Kindly Ones is regarded
The Kindly Ones holds a literary regard score of 68 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Prizes
- Prix Goncourt 2006, winner
Where the story of The Kindly Ones takes place
- The Eastern Front and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (1941 to 1945), the main setting