I don’t know how to talk of this book. Let’s start with a new angle, popular on LW now: the author is your traditional virtuous bleeding-heart liberal, and for his unacknowledged humanist quasi-theocracy he has written THE account of woe, perdition and apocalypse—it has been called the Nazi Life and Fate, yet I’d say it resembles the Book of Job as told by Satan.
Yes, it’s a gratuitous and grotesque fictional account of the Holocaust, but it’s also a work of literary research, trying to puzzle out the implications of this convoulted nightmare—like Dostoevsky foresaw much of the things to come in his works. And if it doesn’t give you nightmares of your own, you haven’t been reading it right. I’m long done with it (a couple of years or so), yet occasionally it still haunts me.
The question is, what, exactly does the industrialization of murder say of us as a species? Viktor Frankl famously abjured the notion of “collective guilt” after his liberation. Yet, with all the mounting evidence, might we all indeed have contacted the taint in some way? Or were we damned to begin with? Do you care to find out?
WARNING: the below is arational.
The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell
I don’t know how to talk of this book. Let’s start with a new angle, popular on LW now: the author is your traditional virtuous bleeding-heart liberal, and for his unacknowledged humanist quasi-theocracy he has written THE account of woe, perdition and apocalypse—it has been called the Nazi Life and Fate, yet I’d say it resembles the Book of Job as told by Satan.
Yes, it’s a gratuitous and grotesque fictional account of the Holocaust, but it’s also a work of literary research, trying to puzzle out the implications of this convoulted nightmare—like Dostoevsky foresaw much of the things to come in his works. And if it doesn’t give you nightmares of your own, you haven’t been reading it right. I’m long done with it (a couple of years or so), yet occasionally it still haunts me.
The question is, what, exactly does the industrialization of murder say of us as a species? Viktor Frankl famously abjured the notion of “collective guilt” after his liberation. Yet, with all the mounting evidence, might we all indeed have contacted the taint in some way? Or were we damned to begin with? Do you care to find out?
Trigger warnings on Less Wrong, I never thought I’d see the day.