1. What is the intent behind the novel’s astonishing accumulation of historical detail? What is the effect of Aue’s descriptions of horrifying crimes in his detached, precise fashion?

2. “I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!” So says Aue at the beginning of the novel. Is he? “I am guilty, you’re not, fine — but you might also have done what I did.” What do you think the author is asking the reader here?

3. What does the importance of bureaucracy, management, and politics to The Kindly Ones contribute to its portrait of Nazi Germany?

4. Why is The Kindly Ones divided into musical sections (Toccata, Sarabande . . .). What is the significance of music, the arts, and intellectual life more generally in The Kindly Ones?

5. What does Aue’s sexuality contribute to your sense of his personality?

6. “Doctor,” I said solemnly, “you are wiser than I am.” — “I never doubted it for an instant, Obersturmbannführer. But I don’t have your mad luck.”

What is Aue’s mad luck, referred to by the doctor in this passage from near the end of the book?

7. Describe Max Aue. What does the author want you to feel for him and think about him, and how does he try to provoke those responses?

8. How much does family matter in The Kindly Ones? You might consider Max’s relationship with Una, what happens to his mother and Moreau in Antibes, the disappearance of his father, etc.

9. Implicitly repudiating Hannah Arendt’s terms, Aue claims that Eichmann was never “an incarnation of banal evil, a soulless, faceless robot.” Why? What do his reasons tell us about Aue himself?

10. Reviewing the novel in the Times Literary Supplement, Justin Beplate commented that “The chief difficulty one encounters in The Kindly Ones . . . is how far the particular aesthetic and formal concerns of literary writing can accommodate such subject matter.” How would you comment on this?

11. The author made a difficult yet firm decision not to explicitly raise the issue of guilt or remorse. What has he achieved by that decision in terms of how the reader reads the novel as a whole — or the character of Maximilien Aue?

12. Why does Jonathan Littell present the policemen Clemens and Weser in somewhat caricatured fashion?

13. The title The Kindly Ones comes from Aeschylus’s trilogy, The Oresteia. Why do you think the author in some way modelled Max Aue on Orestes, who also killed his mother and her lover, and had a relationship with his sister? What do you think he was saying? What other literary allusions are there in the novel?

14. How would you compare The Kindly Ones to other books you have read about World War II and the Holocaust, fictional or non-fictional? It has been called highly original. What new perspective does it contribute to World War II and Holocaust literature?

15. If you could ask Jonathan Littell one question about this novel, what would it be?

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