Sometimes a book comes along that is so divisive it causes a rift within newspapers. Such was Jonathon Little's The Kindly Ones, greeted by rave reviews in Europe when it was published in 2006. In The Times Review Anthony Beevor hailed the "epic novel" as "a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come".
Peter Kemp, in The Sunday Times Review, thought a little differently:
...now made available to English readers in a translation by Charlotte Mandell, The Kindly Ones will surely cause jaws here to drop with a different kind of amazement. For Jonathan Littell's 984-page book is so bloatedly inept that its reverential reception across the Channel seems barely comprehensible...
...The first of the book's numerous improbabilities is Aue's prodigious capacity to recall in profuse, minute detail all that was done and said (often in voluminously voluble speeches) more than 50 years earlier. Inability to forget isn't his only elephantine characteristic. Thumping ponderousness resounds through his mammoth monologue...
...Incontinence is a big problem for Aue, whose virtually incessant bouts of diarrhoea and lengthy nightmares about unstaunchable bowel motions are chronicled copiously (the one literary award this novel could credibly receive, you feel, would be for Most Loose-Sphinctered Fictional Narrator). All of this leaves Littell with a problem on his hands in trying to convince you that Aue is a kind of Everyman (“I tell you I am just like you!”) unluckily born into the wrong historical circumstances..."
Is a review this snarky ever justifiable?
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I don't think that this is a remotely snarky review; I have only read some of the novel in question but, believe me, that was more than enough to concur with Peter Kemp (who is, in my humble opinion, one of the most brilliantly incisive readers of a book around; another is John Carey, who also gave the book a massive thumbs-down - on BBC Radio 4's 'Saturday Review'). When a book has been lauded and awarded in the phenomenal way that it was in France (and by certain people on this side of the channel), it is not unusual for those who genuinely dislike the work in hand to say so in an extremely, er, clear way.
ReplyDeleteI don't find this review snarky in the least; it is too clever, too engaged, too well done and too filled with integrity to be labelled 'snark'.