Feb/Mar 2009
The Sound of the Furies
Jonathan Littell’s narrator, a former SS officer, reflects on his dark deeds
Leland de la Durantaye
Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones begins, “Oh my human brothers.” In so doing, he loses no time in posing the question that the next thousand pages seek to answer: How can men treat their human brothers with calculating and unrelenting cruelty? The speaker is a former SS officer. His direct address is essential to this enterprise, and more than one note of chilling irony can be heard therein. One such is his uncommon cultivation. Littell, a dual citizen of France and the United States, wrote his novel in French, and many of its first readers recognized the famous opening line (“Frères humains qui après nous vivez”) of François Villon’s “Ballade des pendus,” in which the poet, awaiting execution, begs for clemency. Unlike Villon, however, Littell’s narrator, Maximillian Aue, seeks no pardon—and needs none.
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