Fiction as History (as Fiction)

In an article in the Times, Anthony Beevor calls The Kindly Ones ‘a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come’. The review is eminently quotable, of course, but alert readers will have to ask: Really? Scholars?
Told from a point of view both sensationalist and horrifying — that of an SS officer who is an accomplice to all the worst excesses of the war — The Kindly Ones is nevertheless a well-written book. It offers a high style that could easily be a pastiche of Thomas Mann, but goes further than Mann ever did in examining individual guilt in the communal crime of war by describing with chilling meticulousness the criminal acts themselves. Dozens, if not hundreds, of deaths, many gruesome, are given individual attention. The tone is even, the pace stately and measured, the details stomach-turning. From the Commissar Order and the siege of Stalingrad to the Final Solution, tens of pages at a time are dedicated to reproducing conversations in which seemingly intelligent men argue the tertiary particulars of mass murder and enact the most sordid crimes. The writing is in the best taste, it could be argued, and the content the worst.
Some reviewers have argued that because of the book’s opening (‘Oh, my human brothers’), this is a story about how any one could become a Nazi, but the book’s narrator, Maximilian Aue, is a monster, and has been one since long before the war. Forever scarred by the disappearance of his father and his childhood incest with his twin, he begins a make-believe relationship with his sister in which he eats her excrement and has sex with her in a torture chamber. When he is not inhabiting this fantasy, he is an unrepentant murderer who kills not just Jews and other ‘enemies of the Reich’, but both his mother and his best friend for no apparent reason — hardly an everyman. Read more

Irène Némirovsky and the Death of the Critic

We know that to give writing its future, we must overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.’
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes first called for the ‘death of the author’ in 1968. Although it sounded revolutionary, the idea that an author’s work is separate from his identity was an established one, held in esteem by many modernist writers (indeed, in France it arguably goes back at least as far as Théophile Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin; he complained specifically that the press were more interested in the author than in his work). Through circumstances she herself could never have foreseen, a writer who had rejected modernism in its heyday would once again highlight the issue of the author’s ability to affect the reading of a text through biography when her novel, Suite Française, was awarded the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s top literary prizes in 2004. Read more