Thread by @JimmyFalunGong

the past couple years, I haven't read that much fiction, because reality is strange enough, so I occasionally force myself to read fiction. I also rarely reread novels unless they're really good. I recently reread Jonathan Littell's the Kindly Ones, which is one of my favorites

when I first read this, I didn't know much about the horrors of the Einsatzgruppen and the Eastern Front, so this functioned as an introduction to those topics. the main character meets many real characters, and I didn't know most of them until this rereading

for instance, Paul Blobel, the commanding officer at Babi Yar, who temporarily went insane due to the pressures of the mass killings, which figured prominently in Masters of Death, appears in the Kindly Ones

the novel's got heavy Greek tragedy themes in like, multiple ways, and it's pretty transgressive. a dumb guy description of it would probably be like "what if Lolita was about a Nazi and instead of child abuse, it was incest?"

or maybe if like, Bolaño was more direct in his themes and wrote a WWII novel. either way, the novel is great, even though its an almost 1,000 page meditation on everything wrong with the world

check it out if you wanna be sad

oh also, Littell himself is a suslord who worked for an NGO, did war journalism with the Free Syrian Army...

and he wrote a book called "The Security Organs of the Russian Federation: A Brief History 1991-2005", so draw your own conclusions about him ;)

nevermind, "The Security Organs of the Russian Federation. A Brief History 1991–2004" is an article, not a book, and it was hard to find but I got it. either way though.