Black Serendipity
Aue recounts his part in the seminal moments of the Third Reich: the killings on the Eastern Front, Stalingrad, the death camps. Paragraphs go on for pages, with no break for dialogue: apparently, Littell dictated that: ‘The text must consist of great blocks, blocks that are suffocating to the reader, who must not be able to get through them too easily.’ In this, Littell and his translator Charlotte Mandell have succeeded. It took me a month to finish this book, on and off. Random should print t-shirts: I SURVIVED THE KINDLY ONES. And yet it wasn’t entirely a grind. There’s something there that hooks you.
Max Dunbar reviews Jonathan Littell‘s The Kindly Ones.
Spinetingler Magazine Awards
Spinetingler Magazine announce their 2010 nominees and poll. Categories include: New Voice – nominees – A Bad Day For Sorry by Sophie Littlefield; Balzac of the Badlands by Steve Finbow; Dope Thief by Dennis Tafoya; The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville; I-5 by Summer Brenner; In Their Blood by Sharon Potts; The Lost Sister […]