  cover art  The Kindly Ones  Jonathan Littell  (HarperCollins;
US: Mar 2009)  The Kindliest Cut of All  Sometimes, there is in
what is horrible and true a great and terrible beauty. There is
nothing whatsoever beautiful about Jonathan Littel’s novel of
Nazi German atrocities, The Kindly Ones, though there is much
that is both great and terrible, in the best and worst sense of
those words.  At just shy of 1,000 pages, The Kindly Ones is not
for the faint of heart or short of patience. Its densely-packed
pages (even long sections of dialogue are printed in run-on, in
pages-long paragraphs, providing no relief to the eye) contain
long passages about linguistics and etymology, political
philosophy, and bureaucratic machinations, and there are
countless acronyms (mostly left undefined by the brief glossary
at the back of the book) referring to Nazi military and
bureaucratic entities that finally tend to just glide by the
eye. But with all its longeurs and heft, this tombstone of a
book is one of the best novels o