The Kindly Ones

The audiobook The Kindly Ones, written by Jonathan Littell, translated by Michala Marková. Read by Kajetán Písařovic, directed by Jakub Tabery. The narration of the convinced Nazi and SS officer Maximilien Aue takes us through several different settings of the Second World War, from the front line to the occupied territories and the home front. The text is conceived as Aue's fictional memoirs, written long after the war. In them, Aue does not defend himself, but rather tries to explain, in his own way, how and why one small cog in a horrific killing machine operates. For his monumental excursion into the soul of a small fish among war criminals, Jonathan Littell was awarded the Grand Prix of the French Academy and the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2006. JONATHAN LITTELL Jonathan Littell was born into a Jewish family that had emigrated from Poland to the United States at the end of the 19th century; his father is the writer Robert Littell. He graduated from the Lycée Fénelon in Paris and went to America to study at Yale. After three years at Yale, he left for the then-warring Balkans. Over the course of seven years, he took part in humanitarian missions for the non-profit organisation Action contre la Faim, mainly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also in various places around the world such as Chechnya, Afghanistan, Congo, and even Moscow. In 2001, he decided to end his humanitarian work and began writing his first novel, The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes), an extensive fresco depicting the Second World War and the Eastern Front through the fictional memoirs of an educated SS officer, Maximilian Aue. His only previous work, Bad Voltage, was published in 1989 by Signet Books. Although the book contains no mention of the author, frequent references to France and authors such as Jean Genet and Charles Baudelaire, and to Paris, undoubtedly point to the same author. He mentions the Parisian underground several times, where the story (often) takes place. (During his studies at the Lycée Fénelon in Paris, Jonathan Littell was a so-called cataphile – a lover of illegal expeditions into the Parisian underground and beyond. The name is a neologism from the Greek katkiros, kingdom of the dead, and philein, to love). The aforementioned book, which he wrote at the age of just 22, is a sci-fi essay set in the world of Cyberpunk. KAJETÁN PÍSAŘOVIC Kajetán Písařovic is a passionate fan of books and audiobooks, and perhaps that is why he has become a very popular narrator beloved by reviewers. He graduated from the Janáček Conservatory in Ostrava and has worked in the Czech-Polish Těšín Theatre, the Puppet Theatre in Ostrava, the Petr Bezruč Theatre, the Drama Studio in Ústí nad Labem, and on Prague stages such as the Theatre on the Balustrade and the Švanda Theatre. He has also acted in several films and series, for example, Rodina Aloise Rašína, Jan Hus, Pustina, and Pojišťovna štěstí. He narrates not only commercial audiobooks but also books for the K. E. Macan Library and Printing House for the Blind. Copyright © Jonathan Littell 2006