I generally do not read serious literature. Or literature meant to be serious. I’m a bit of a lightweight, I suppose. I’ve read all 16 books of the Reacher series but I still haven’t gotten through Moby Dick, despite numerous attempts. Call me Ishmael … the Quitter.

But in this case, I have fought my way through a controversial book from a few years back, “The Kindly Ones,” written by the French-American author Jonathan Littell.

It is nearly 1,000 pages of extraordinary violence as well as sexual depravity, the story of a fictional SS officer who pops up here and there, sort of like a fascist Zelig, during World War II.

It is both deeply disturbing … and perhaps important.

First a couple of reviews from the New York Times. In this review, David Gates describes the book as “a work of Tolstoyan heft, Dostoyevskyan darkness and Proustian sentence length” that is “apparently a middlebrow historical epic gone willfully weird.” Meanwhile, Michiko Kakutani trashes the book in this review, also in NYT, calling it “willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent.”

Perhaps the most succinct bit of criticism described The Kindly Ones as the “pornography of violence.”

I do not recommend the book to anyone unless they have a high threshold for gore and mountains of killing — as well as one of the more perverse set of sexual preferences ever ascribed to a character.

I confess that the book cast a sort of darkness over me, at times. It actually changed my mood, and for the worse. I started and stopped it three times before finally getting through.

What may make it worthwhile, to those of a certain constitution (or lack of sensitivity), is what feels like the verite of it all. The Second World War was a remarkably violent event, with civilians targeted for death unlike any other European war in centuries.

The main character happens to bounce around the Third Reich, generally turning up at the hottest spots. In the second part of the book, he is in the Caucauses early in the war, where he gets into long and absurd (in theory “scholarly”) debates with other Nazis over whether a particular enclave in the mountains are Jewish enough to warrant extermination.

Later, he gets into Stalingrad, joining the trapped German Sixth Army, a plot device which is not about genocide but rather one of the most brutal and pitiless battles that ever changed world history. The main character has a long and telling discussion with a Russian commissar who has been captured and wil soon be shot.

He gets back to Berlin, where civilians are bombed and killed in their thousands by Allied aircraft, goes back into the East where he is part of an attempt to get better diets for prisoners (of war, of conscience, of religion) so that they will live long enough to be useful workers for the Reich.

And at the end he meets Hitler, and deals with the final days, with the Russian horde overrunning the Thousand Year Reich amidst scenes of destruction and madness … which again, feels very much like it could have been just as it was inside a mad regime being brought to an end by another mad regime.

Again, don’t read this if you are not ready for specific, graphic violence — which may in fact have been the sort of thing that regular people encountered during those dark years.

The French believe it is an important book. They may be right.