Perversities Of A Nazi Narrator
If I hadn’t already devoured “The Kindly Ones,” by Jonathan Littell (pictured) in both its original French and in a new English translation, I would have raced down to the bookstore as soon as I read this indignant pan of the novel, by the schoolmarmish Michiko Kakutani, in today’s New York Times. Money shot: ‘Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade, or by the warped narrator of “American Psycho,†after repeated viewings of “The Night Porter†and “The Damned.‒
