12:24 PM 20 OCTOBER 2017
I’m not usually minded to update on reading ‘progress’, but for this “monument of contemporary literature” I’ve made an exception. Firstly, it’s a fairly impressive tome, weighing in at nearly a thousand pages, which implies a fairly large investment in time. But, the subject matter is also destined to be harrowing and is likely to be interspersed with some lighter reads, in an effort to stave off emotional exhaustion.
Perhaps, if I explain the book is a fictional memoir of Dr Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer and the first hundred or so pages has been dominated by the Nazi invasion eastward into Poland in World War II and the central character’s involvement in the attendant atrocities, you will appreciate the nature of the task. Certainly it is not an easy read! Trying to illuminate the seductive nature of evil on such a terrifying scale is ambitious and man’s capacity for inhumanity is frightening! Whether this book enhances the understanding of the horror of war and the tragic consequences is another matter.
My early impression of the novel is that it’s well written, but that Jonathan Littell must have known his approach would be controversial. Notwithstanding the cover sleeve suggests it has been compared to “classics of world literature, including War and Peace”, time will tell whether it was worth the effort. The sleeve also suggests that “this is a book that every thinking person should read and to which no one can be indifferent”. Whatever my ultimate conclusions, I’m sure that will be true. I’m already far from indifferent, but the thinking is perhaps necessarily uncomfortable.
BurfoBookish 