The American Booksellers Association, on its Web site indiebound.org, recommended "The Kindly Ones" on its March list.
But if sales of "The Kindly Ones" go on to defy the novel's harshest critics, it would not be unprecedented.
In the last paragraph of the novel, the narrator, after he relentlessly killed his friend and protector, suddenly finds himself "alone with time and sadness": "The Kindly Ones were on to me".
Mr. Burnham and Harper have a lot riding on "The Kindly Ones," given how much they spent to acquire and market it.
"The Kindly Ones," the 983-page novel by Jonathan Littell that went on sale on Tuesday, is a fictionalized memoir of a remorseless former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather.
The Kindly Ones is simply 'Houellebecq does nazism'". On this note, it's worth saying that although Littell's book has serious flaws, it does attempt to feel its way into the inner psychological textures of nazism, whereas Binet tends to settle for the simpler procedure of external caricature: "rodent-faced" Himmler, Rohm "like a pig".
The big book of the year – working on poundage alone – was Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, an epic and epically serious novel narrated from the point of view of an SS Officer serving on the Eastern Front.
But, Mayer goes on, the Furies can also be Eumenides, the "Kindly Ones" as the Athenians called them, who represent the "difficult transition from a crescendo to a diminuendo of violence".
The Kindly Ones is simply 'Houellebecq does nazism'".
The Kindly Ones reveals something that is desperate and depressing but profoundly important, now as ever.
To pacify the Furies, she transformed them into the Eumenides, the "Kindly Ones".
