The Kindly Ones

It is a horrifying book, written beautifully.

Of course, you say, it is the story of an SS officer who happens to find himself in all the most violent areas under German occupation, seeing and often participating in some of worst aspects of the holocaust. Of course it is horrifying. But that is not all, it is also a horrifying character who is morally repugnant most of the time, but then sympathetic just long enough for us to become repelled by our own sympathy for him. The work drifts seamlessly and thus frighteningly from intellectual journeys into contemporary debates over race and ethnicity, to the depths of the scatological, psychotic, and incestuous.

I am impressed with the research and I recognize relatively recent scholarship on the Third Reich in this work. It is not repetitive in showing off its knowledge, but the author seems to have enjoyed exploring the background of a whole range of issues from the war in this work of fiction. Only in a section towards the end does the author seem to realize that he has slipped too far from his story towards a sort of historian narrator. He sometimes has his character correct himself when he notices it.