Carole Angier
The Horror
The Kindly Ones
By Jonathan Littell (Translated by Charlotte Mandell)
Chatto & Windus 992pp £20 order from our bookshop
This book has divided the world. The French love it, and gave it not only the Prix Goncourt but the Académie Française’s Prix de la Littérature as well. The British are split – Antony Beevor loved it, Peter Kemp hated it. The survivor–writer Jorge Semprún admired it; Claude Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, first hated it, then changed his mind. Most Americans and Canadians loathe it.
Why? And who is right and wrong?
That should be a naïve question, since wildly differing responses to the same book are perfectly normal. But here there is, I think, a right and a wrong answer, though not simple ones. Those who admire The Kindly Ones are right, but those who loathe it are not
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
We've extended our February offer for a week, meaning you can still get a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
Click below for details.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'McCarthy’s portrayal of a cosmos fashioned by God for killing and exploitation, in which angels, perhaps, are predators and paedophiles, is one that continues to haunt me.'
@holland_tom on reading Blood Meridian in the American west (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/devils-own-country
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis