Hardest Fictional Novel – The Kindly Ones

I’ve been browsing those “hardest books to read” lists, but I never see The Kindly Ones mentioned. Has anyone here finished the nearly 1,000-page nightmare novel? Or am I alone in my suffering?

The book is relentless, full of war crimes, genocide, mass shootings, pogroms, sexual violence, starvation, sexual assault, incest,etc. Man's inhumanity to man during WWII? Name your war crime, this book probably has it.

I’ve read a lot of challenging history books, mostly about WWII and genocide, but also about colonialism. King Leopold’s Ghost and Late Victorian Holocausts come to mind. Then the heavy hitters: Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, Bloodlands: Between Stalin and Hitler, Ordinary Men, Anatomy of a Genocide, Auschwitz: A New History, Flyboys, The Drowned and the Saved, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and others. I’m usually pretty difficult to upset. I spent years reading disturbing texts for school

My capstone project for my history degree was about lynching as a spectacle and how white American media’s portrayal of it evolved from the 19th to the early 20th century. I read accounts of every imaginable act of racial hatred carried out in front of an audience: immolation, mutilation, castration, strangulation, and more.

I'm used to a certain academic distance that allows me to get through these texts without being upset or emotional.

But The Kindly Ones… where do I even begin? As a fictional account of an unrepentant SD officer involved with the Einsatzgruppen (and disturbingly sexually obsessed with his twin sister), it’s one of the most harrowing reading experiences I’ve ever had. Maximilien Aue got under my skin in a way few characters ever have. I feel a little dirty even trying to describe this book.

I don’t really know how to describe it beyond the surface; I just know I felt a little haunted after finishing it. Aue is the most interesting, but also the most foul example of humanity I've read in any book. He is an unreliable narrator incarnate.

The novel is truly a Greek tragedy in a Nazi uniform. I entered the story interested in how someone could choose to engage in war crimes for the state. I left the book thinking about how a man could rationalize incest and be so completely in denial about brutally killing his French mother and stepfather… to avenge a deadbeat German father who abandoned him… his reason for wearing the black uniform to make himself into a Greek hero, a perpetual victim of fate. If only the furies were real and would catch up with him. Of failing that, Mossad.

Has anyone else read it? Did it get under your skin, too? Or am I alone?