Garth Risk Hallberg has a great post on the Millions Blog on Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, Holocaust, Evil and Postmodernism. It is a bit long, but it is worth reading. Sugary excerpt:
Under the old dispensation, writing about the Holocaust was seen as
brave precisely because one owed it to one's subject to also be good.
Under the new one, you can dedicate your novel to "the dead" and still
have your readers walk away remembering mostly the masturbation
fantasies. If no one will honor your bravery, it's only because you've
managed to annihilate the source of any risk you might have run.
Such is our current situation. We've moved from the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy to the Angel at the Fence kerfuffle, from The Drowned and the Saved to BOY IN PJS.
We've crossed the great divide between reverence and "meh." This
movement is called postmodernism, and in abler hands than Littell's, it
may yet prove itself capable of finding new ways to speak about the
unspeakable. And yet it's worth remembering that its direct forerunner,
Friedrich Nietzsche, called not for the abandonment of all values, but their revaluation. The example of The Kindly Ones
suggests that that revaluation becomes more difficult, not less, in the
absence of something to rebel against. When nothing is sacred, there
can be no sacrilege.
Having read the book both in French and in English (it was a better read in English because French can make the mundane and heavy prose so irritable and depressing that reading it feels as one felt as a child having to read part of the Bible, which didn't talk about sex, romance or some form of betrayal), I never felt that I was reading something masterful, but rather a work of art, something on which somebody had worked hard. I guess is that sense of hard work, which make people can it masterful. My point is that Littell's book is about the desacralization of its subject matter and not much else. I don't remember any of its sentences. I can still see some of its gross imagery, but everything else is gone and disappears in the abyss of pompous noise and grandiose-like literature enamored with the easiness in which it can deconstruct something sacred or important. The book isn't about the banality of evil, because that would me it reflective and philosophical, it is about its nihilation. The more its narrator talks, the less we see and feel. He doesn't have a face and what he did is evil,but it is mostly about nothingness. The Kindly Ones doesn't horrify, it doesn't leave me perplexed, I read it like I read my chemistry book in English in High School. I was having a hard time understanding English and yet, I had to try to understand a subject, which I hated. It was an interesting exercise because I had to try to make Na-Cl mean something. I was never successful,but still, I couldn't help but to try fearing that I was missing, which is probably why I read The Kindly Ones in both French and English. But the way, I managed to get a C in chemistry and that should tell you a lot about my ability to complete atrociously boring tasks.