I'll wait for the movie.

Korda can buy a copy for Archbishop (or whatever he is today) Richard Williamson. Williamson can get off on it, too!

Great review. I'm sold. Thanks much.

Yes, please give the the reader a break. You could've pared this article down by half, easily. Who cares that you read it in the French, before it came out here? If no one's counting the number of languages you speak, why enumerate them for us?

But never mind all that. Korda's biggest problem is that he doesn't actually address Kakutani's argument that creating this monster of a character is a big gratuitous lie. What of the banality of evil? The point being that yes, perfectly normal people participated in genocide, but this character clearly is not normal.

I can't speak much more to this, not counting French among one of the three language I speak. I'd like to see some actual debate. Pick Kakutani's argument apart piece by piece rather than pompously yelling "tough shit."

Stock up on drinks and snacks before you sit down and read this atrocity about atrocities. Really? Party time, anyone? Only someone with no soul can revel in the "genius" of such a book. For any other human being, the reading of this book would be unendurable pain. Obviously there are people out there who find this literature. It may better be described as evil as pornography.

This is the type of book that may have shocked ages ago. But are we not all a tad tired of the debauched title character? When Nabokov wrote that monster Humbert Humbert, it probably shocked, but now transgression and even utter depravity are commonplaces. This is probably another sick bore.

Mr. Korda: You are wrong in key ways in your assessment of THE KINDLY ONES.

I too am trilingual (English, French, and Hebrew) and I also read THE KINDLY ONES in its original French and obtained an English version (both books are expensive and the cost alone makes them only resonant to a sliver of the literary intelligentsia...not even the most thoughtful, reasoned, educated people can afford this book in its original form).

The protagonist's portrayal is not realistic and nor is the portrayal of Nazi Germany. We are within the radical, fetishistic point of view of a beyond-sadist whose behavior rivals the slipshod whims of the Ancient Greek and Roman gods.

Indeed, the title of the book refers to the name that Athena bestowed on to the Furies who in the last play of the The Oresteia triology by Aeschylus (called "The Kindly Ones," or The Eumenides) spare the life of Orestes even though he and his sister, Electra, killed their mother Clytemnestra.

But the book is woefully weak in its mythic plotting and it does not earn its title with its indication of god-bestowed mercy.

The book is gratuitous. There is no modulation in its depiction, no redemption or redress for the damned, no development of the protagonist's characterization, no real depth of discovery in the human scale of the investigation.

Instead, the novel is a 1000 page (or so) fetish. It ends up REPEATING on a literary level the unchecked violence that it presents so gratuitously.

A man like you should NEVER become an apologist for a malformed book like this.

But it is a product of true pretentiousness to latch on to something like this novel because everyone else in one's elite crowd seems to praise it. It's like the Madoff scandal in literary terms...everyone loved the emperor until he was stripped of his clothes.

Your view of this book is deplorable.

This is an astonishing review. A literary "masterpiece" offers a modicum of redeeming qualities even if the subject matter is grim in the extreme, as it is here. Littell's novel is an unrelenting portrayal of the banality of evil -- to use Hannah Arendt's phrase --, clinically antiseptic in its writing style, and ultimately a crashing, long-winded bore. A work that aspires to masterpiece status should oxygenate the reader in some way. The thousand pages of this book are totally devoid of oxygen. It is stifling, suffocating, spiritless from beginning to end.

I don't think it should be overlooked that Korda is published by Harpercollins - Littell's publisher -- and after a string of horrific reviews, they might be doing some damage control here...

Most of the critical comments seem to come from one of two p�ints of view. Either the moralists who want some redeeming feature of these unredeemable people or those who find Littell doesn't follow their college writing course's definition of how to write for the American public. I guess there's a third possibility: missing the point altogether as Kakatani did in the NYT. I read this in France. I'm not a kid whose memory of these events come from books or a religious horror of the loss. I simply knew some of the perpetrators, some of the survivors of the camps, some of their immediate relatives, and the context of it all. Littell's book is as brilliant and spellbinding as Korda describes. It is also a look at something we don't like to see except in dumb movies, Real, I mean REAL horror and realistic representations of it. We like our Rwandas & Darfus as fairly abstract little bytes, readable, forgetable, over breakfast coffee. We certainly don't want to see what REAL people do to others in Israel, Gaza, Afghanistan, Kazahkstan, or what they did in Argentina, etc. ad infinitum. We like it all newswothy. Littel brilliantly describes the doers and Mr. Korda and I and hundreds of thousands of readers were gripped by the realism, the driving, relentless realism that real people went through for years at the hands of millions of Aues. The rest of you should stick with Truman Capote, Stephen King and the Chain Saw Massacres or wring your hands and forget that the Aues out there are doing this every day. And some of them are us! And every man, woman and child who gets sliced up looks in the eyes of some Aue - many of whom just get away with it.

You mentioned that we as Americans have never had to live with evil and ignore it. What about our years of slavery & segregation? I'd call that evil. Don't you think many white Americans, especially in the South, had to make tough choices concerning what was going on around them during that period in our history?

"We, in America and Great Britain, have never had to live with evil and ignore it, or pretend it wasn't happening, as people did all over Europe, and indeed even in Germany herself." really? what about u.s. extermination of the indians, vietnam, a huge atrocity from the golf of tonkien, to the free fire zones to the defoliation program and agent orange. AGENT ORANGE ought to be the color and name of U.S. evil!

One of the "best" summaries I've ever read that congeals the perennially toxic stew that was WW2 Germany's industrial murder complex into expounding upon its insidious horror, is that ordinary people, like accountants, audited not just the bodycount but tabulated the amounts of hair, gold teeth and fur coats ripped from the Reich's victims. These people were doing their "job" and receiving a salary in a bureaucracy created specifically to handle jewish "affairs."

The protagonist in this novel is nothing new being more of the same casual monster stereotype straight out of central casting, the same one sees in motion pictures like Schindler's List's SS Commandant Amon Goeth and reads about in history books ("We were only carrying out orders as obedient soldiers"defense.) Littell's character, a repellent creature to be sure, whose unrepentant actions don't interfer with a good night's rest, is more typecasting. He's calculated,like Schindler's List's Goeth to be a character setup to wring the normal expected revulsion from viewers/readers.

By concentrating on the brutal atrocities at the death camps, one capsulizes and diminishes the full brunt and enduring impact of the holocaust. It's real, wider-ranging dimensions lay closer to home, with neighbors, friends and the moral ambiguities of those who refused from the very beginning to challenge the promulgation of the Nuremburg racial laws.

In order to aspire to be a great world novel, Littell would have had to focus on the homlier side of the equation, the silent complicity of ordinary folk, to expand upon the meaning of gross inhumanity in order for readers to fully conceive the enormity. Elie Weisel's NIGHT better explores what the Nazi's called The Shadow and The Fog, their subliminal moniker for the eradication of Jews and Gypsies, with infinitely more knowledge, wisdom and personal pathos than Littell's tome can ever hope to accede. More will come along who will attempt to put this gargantuan travesty into perspective. Perhaps some may even succeed.

For those who want to read the novel don't get discouraged by 1000 pages of densely packed text. actually its a very easy read. Narrative style is very simple.The translator has done a good job.and thank God there are no foot notes. thanx for that Mr Littell.