The Kindly Ones

So I finnished the Kindly Ones. Holy fuck. 975 page book with paragraph breaks that only excist every 5 pages or so. Fuck you. The book would have to be pretty god damned epic in order to keep my atension for that long. And it DID!!! YAY! Truely an amazing piece of literature that is well worth reading. A word of warning though, keep wiki handy because I had to go back more than once to brush up on my WW2 history in order to keep track of what is going on.

So yeah the book. Holy fuck there is so much to say I don't even really know where to begin. I mean so much shit happens in it. Ye gods. I guess I am just going to make a little list.

Interesting things.

1) The charecter's many dream sequences and hallucinations bring about all sorts avenues of discussion.

2) What the hell is up with dyareha? Hmm I have no idea how to spell it, I know that y belongs there though. Where does its significance with the dreams fall in with its prevalence throughout the book.

3) Comparing the main charecter's dwindling sanity as part of a paralle to the nazi jewish extermination project.

4) Examine the bueracratic absurdities that they applied to "the jewish question" along with their seemingly inability to halt the genocide process.

5) The main charecter as a complete failure to national socialism and as a soldier. In fact he is a terrible main charecter, who is propped up time and time again by both Mandlerbroad and Thomas.

6) Oh and WTF ending. Okay look the main charecter for most of the book isn't a bad guy. He is disgusted by the application of the "jewish question" he struggles to gain better treatment for the folks in Auswitz, and the horrors of war profoundly upsets him to the point of sickness and depression. Compared to his friend Thomas the MC is a saint. This is of course overlooking the fact that he killed his parents but whatever. No one is perfect and he was pretty much insane at that point in the book. But fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. I hated the way it ended. He wasn't being insane there. He made a cold calculated manuver that was compleatly unessisary. Thomas would of carried him out of germany on his back if nessisary like he did for the whole fucking war. What the MC did was unacceptable. I loved Thomas, and sure I spent 25-100 pages trying to proove he was still alive and not a deranged hallucination but DAMNIT. Thomas is a badass and deserved better than to have his head bashed in by his best friend who he saved time and time again. Fuck you MC no wonder why everyone shits on you.

7) Twins. They are EVERYWHERE in the book, from Mandlerbroad's assistents, to the MC and his sister, to his sister's kids, to the midgets in the halluciation at the end of Staligrad, to... okay well anyway there are a lot of twins in the book and they interconnect thematicly with stuff going on.

8) Oh the relationship between the MC and Hitler and how the MC adopted Hitler as a father figgure. There are also his hallucinations involving hitler and the scene where he bites his nose. Yeah he bit hitler's nose! It was awesome!

9) The whole wierd gender distortion thing he had going on with his sister.

10) The structure of the paragraphs as gramatical unit and how they were broken up along with the information they carried. There is a lot to that topic as the author really makes good use of the elongated paragraphs for all sorts of purposes, which I haven't been really able to track,

11) There is something to all the dead animals in the zoo I can't put my figgure on what it is though.

12) oh and there is something worth writting about the feral children. I think in paticular it is worth going over how there was a pack of female feral children in russia but male children in germany and the relative diffrences between the two.

Anyway it feels like I climbed a mountain, and now that I don't have to carry that big ass book around with me anymore I feel more than a little lost. SADNESS! Oh well. I have some other things I am supposed to be reading so I'll grab a few of those before tackling another big project I guess. Over the next couple of days I might expand on some of these ideas. I just kinda wanted to lay them all out and give them a good think through. Okay well I am going to go do something else.