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?
Showing posts with label The Sunday Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Sunday Times. Show all posts
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