Now that I’ve finished Jonathan Littell’s monumental novel of World War II, The Kindly Ones — perhaps it would be better to say that The Kindly Ones has finished me off, overwhelming me with its deranging account of moral confusion (for what it would be wrong to say of the Nazi universe recreated in the novel’s pages is that it is amoral) — now that I’m done, but have nothing yet to say, except “Wow” and “Whoa,” I can at least note that what prompted me to pick up the book, after nearly four years’ neglect, was Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, which I read last month and wrote about, briefly, soon after.

Not that I can remember just what it was about Keilson’s fiction that sent me back to Littell’s. It may have been something like this: if Comedy in a Minor Key not only cheered me up but also left me smiling, how bad could The Kindly Ones be — and wouldn’t it be great to transfer two massive tomes (the French original and the much thicker translation) from the reading pile to a library shelf, perhaps library shelf in somebody else’s home? You’ll note that I never mentioned reason here; there was no reason in the world to proceed from the one book to the other. They didn’t appear to have anything in common — when I finished the Comedy, I’d read about 150 pages of The Kindly Ones — and I can now attest that, beyond a vague overlap in temporal setting, the two books have in fact nothing whatever in common. It is indeed “great” to move the two Littells to another shelf, but they won’t be leaving the house.

In a fever dream that Max Aue, Littell’s protagonist, suffers toward the end of the novel, shooting stars hit the earth and sprout monstrous seaweedy plants, which proceed to cover the surface of the planet. In Charlotte Mandell’s excellent translation, Jonathan Littell’s végétaux avides become “greedy vegetables.” It’s an intoxicating note.

Wow!

Whoa!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2010 at 3:00 pm.