
The Kindly Ones
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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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Jonathan Littell
About this listen
"Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened." So begins the chilling fictional memoir of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France.
Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
During the period from June 1941 through April 1945, Max is posted to Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; he is present at the Battle of Stalingrad and at Auschwitz; and he lives through the chaos of the final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin.
Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures, such as Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss, and Hitler himself.
A supreme historical epic and a haunting work of fiction, Jonathan Littell's masterpiece is intense, hallucinatory, and utterly original. Published to impressive critical acclaim in France in 2006, it went on to win the Prix Goncourt, that country's most prestigious literary award, and sparked a broad range of responses and questions from readers: How does fiction deal with the nature of human evil? How should a novel encompass the Holocaust? At what point do history and fiction come together and where do they separate?
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Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who chronicles his contemplations in this so-called "factless" autobiography, the work is a journey of one man’s soul and, by extension, of all human souls that allow their minds and hearts to roam far and free.
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The book that saved my life
- By Hutchinson on 03-09-21
By: Fernando Pessoa
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My Friends
- A Novel
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.
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Beautifully written
- By Anonymous User on 06-24-24
By: Hisham Matar
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The New York Trilogy
- By: Paul Auster
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Auster's signature work, The New York Trilogy, consists of three interlocking novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room - haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller.
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Perhaps more interesting than important
- By Darwin8u on 10-04-13
By: Paul Auster
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The End of the Affair
- By: Graham Greene
- Narrated by: Colin Firth
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Graham Greene’s evocative analysis of the love of self, the love of another, and the love of God is an English classic that has been translated for the stage, the screen, and even the opera house. Academy Award-winning actor Colin Firth (The King’s Speech, A Single Man) turns in an authentic and stirring performance for this distinguished audio release.
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Colin Firth Kills It
- By Em on 05-09-12
By: Graham Greene
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Middlesex
- By: Jeffrey Eugenides
- Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori
- Length: 21 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
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Anything but middle.
- By Michael on 05-04-03
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Moby-Dick
- By: Herman Melville
- Narrated by: Frank Muller
- Length: 21 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Labeled variously a realistic story of whaling, a romance of unusual adventure and eccentric characters, a symbolic allegory, and a drama of heroic conflict, Moby Dick is first and foremost a great story. It has both the humor and poignancy of a simple sea ballad, as well as the depth and universality of a grand odyssey.
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I Had No Idea Melville Was So Funny
- By Dave on 05-09-12
By: Herman Melville
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The World After Gaza
- A History
- By: Pankaj Mishra
- Narrated by: Mikhail Sen
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is.
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A brilliant analysis of the immoral reality of today’s world
- By Mike on 05-20-25
By: Pankaj Mishra
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American Psycho
- By: Bret Easton Ellis
- Narrated by: Pablo Schreiber
- Length: 16 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
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Fanntastic book but maybe not for everyone....
- By So Fain on 03-27-11
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Beloved
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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Author-read Books
- By John R Williford on 07-14-06
By: Toni Morrison
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
By: Joan Didion
The one insanity of war keeps coming round to drive the protagonist even more deranged with each day.
This book took me a long time to read. Often I had to stop for my own mental health but in the end I am wowed by how much has been captured so accurately by the author and narrator.
Intense
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Shocking yet compelling
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I bought it because I couldn’t find the original French version. I read it when it was published and I was in shock. The translation is good, without being exceptional, losing something of the horrendous lyricism of the Nazis, extraordinarily rendered in the original version. But it preserves the essential: how an “intellectual” became a monster.
This is a “livre-monde”, a book that recreates a world per se, and this world is hell.
The Shoah by bullets (Babi Yar and so many others sites of horror), the death camps, the deportations, the destruction of the European Jews, the gas vans, invented by the Stalinists and reimplemented by the Nazis…
A lesson in history.
The so-called digressions (linguistics, politics, music, literature etc.) enhance the monstrosity of the main character and his peers.
And yes, there are shocking descriptions of bodily functions, there is incest, rape, They show how amorality led to immorality, and finally to a serial killer’s perverse mind.
Do not read it if you expect euphemisms.
But do read it if you want some understanding of a mass crime that may be committed again. Because sadly, hatred is a part of human nature.
Mesmerising
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Any additional comments?
The SS officer, sent to different theaters of WWII, narrates his experiences, ranging from comical to harrowing, in a calm, somewhat detached manner. This contrasts with the tremendous emotional and physical injuries he sustains along the way.He frequently ruminates on why and how ordinary German soldiers and leaders perpetuated war crimes and crimes against humanity individually and on a grand scale. These passages are thoughtful but still unsatisfying.
He indulges in grotesque and fetishistic sexual fantasies, as well as senseless violence, which increase in frequency and intensity toward the end. These reveal the depth of his inner turmoil and unhappiness, bordering on madness, but go farther than necessary to make the point; by the end, they become unpleasant and irritating distractions, and likewise unsatisfying in helping the reader understand Max better.
The war takes him to Kiev in 1941, the Caucuses and Stalingrad in 1942, Crimea and Italy in 1943, Auschwitz in 1944, and Berlin until the end of the war. The descriptions of real German officers and leaders, Russian locals, attitudes, events, and horrors of war are absolutely superb.
The recording is excellent, as the narrator does a great job getting through lengthy, rambling passages, that may be otherwise hard to get through. He brings to life dialogues between characters, that would take mental effort to read through and unravel.
Great recording of interesting but lengthy book
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Read or listen only if you have a strong stomach.
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With that said there were sections where i almost gave up, there are 2 sections of the book where Little uses sexual hallucinations to invoke the furries. However these are a too long even for me, i am in no way a conservative but, jesus there is only so many ways to #@$#$ your sister. Make your thematic point and then move on. Of course the irony of being disquested at the main character more for his sexuality than his role in the holocust is irony in in itself
Far as history goes, As a educated amateur historian, i found this novel, extremely well researched and historically accurate except for a few editing errors. There is more accurate historical material here than most non-fiction books on the subject.
The Disgust of the Mind's Eye
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I starting reading as a book and finished it on Audible
- Drive a lot!
It is so well written. But it is definitely not for the faint of heart or anyone easily offended as in that regard it covers every base except bestiality!?
I often wondered how the narrator managed to get through it....he does a great job.
Gut Wrenching
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Excellent Work
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not for the faint hearted
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I cannot imagine how long the war must have been for those who suffered through it. It is hard to imagine the horrors, but Mr Littell shows it to us. Unfortunately, he does that using too many graphic details which, for the one not accustomed to those, seems to be excessive.
It is excessive.
I could only finish this book because it is hard for me to leave one alone without finishing it. I wanted to know where he wanted to take us with the story of Max Aue, a German/French WWII war criminal. Yes, criminal. In so many ways...
No, fortunately, we are not all like Aue. I hope that, if we were in a situation similar to those in the lower ranks of a country and lived in a situation like he lived, we would act differently. Well, in lower or higher ranks, for that matter.
Despite having many good philosophical questions and serious debates on the why's of the war and the choices that were taken, I DO NOT recommend the book. I don't believe we need to revive terrible situations in excessive detail to understand the deeper questions and problems of any war.
Having said that, unfortunately, I think that the book will stay with me for a while, more than I would hope for.
Once again, even knowing that when we DON'T recommend something, this ends up being a recommendation for some, I DO NOT recommend it.
P.s.: some parts of the ending are laughable (too much on the nose, someone?) and quite unbelievable, as if the author, seeing that the book was already too long, decided to rush things because he didn't want to make it even longer and cross the 1000 pages threshold.
P.s.2: the narrator is fabulous. The German accent seemed very German to my untrained ears. On the other hand, the French one, threw me off a little. Fortunately there is little french in the text. I would definitely listen to more perfromances from Grover Gardner.
2 Star Book - 5 Star Narration
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