Scan barcode
gitli57's review
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
4.0
This is an omnibus edition containing all three volumes of Siegfried Sassoon's fictionalized memoirs, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infant Officer and Sherston's Progress. They are the account of a young man of privileged birth growing up in the English countryside and then being sucked into the inferno that was the Western Front during World War 1.
The Memoirs is not a self-glorifying account full of heroics and daring deeds. It also is not war porn, dwelling on extremely detailed accounts of as many horrors as possible. Sassoon came of age as a highly privileged member of Brit society just as the war was beginning. He entered the military untrained, but as a member of the "officer class". The memoirs are an honest sharing of his experiences and how they transformed him. They offer great insight into why all those who lived through it spoke of "before the War" and "after the War".
If "stiff upper lip for God, King and Country" is your thing, stick to Kipling. Also look elsewhere if you are after lovingly detailed descriptions of battle tactics and weapons systems.
Sassoon's class snobbery can occasionally be grating and like most Brit writers of the time, he is casually racist. While he can be a bit of a drama queen, there is refreshingly little self-serving angst. There are many writers who would have turned these experiences into a trauma narrative. Sassoon doesn't and I suspect he would have found it self-pitying and distasteful to do so.
The Memoirs is not a self-glorifying account full of heroics and daring deeds. It also is not war porn, dwelling on extremely detailed accounts of as many horrors as possible. Sassoon came of age as a highly privileged member of Brit society just as the war was beginning. He entered the military untrained, but as a member of the "officer class". The memoirs are an honest sharing of his experiences and how they transformed him. They offer great insight into why all those who lived through it spoke of "before the War" and "after the War".
If "stiff upper lip for God, King and Country" is your thing, stick to Kipling. Also look elsewhere if you are after lovingly detailed descriptions of battle tactics and weapons systems.
Sassoon's class snobbery can occasionally be grating and like most Brit writers of the time, he is casually racist. While he can be a bit of a drama queen, there is refreshingly little self-serving angst. There are many writers who would have turned these experiences into a trauma narrative. Sassoon doesn't and I suspect he would have found it self-pitying and distasteful to do so.
mrs_merdle's review
2.0
I finally finally plowed my way through this book. I have a feeling a lot of people consider this a classic, and I am all about classics, but MAN! I thought it was one of the more boring books I've ever read. I think the main problems for me were these: 1) Siegfried Sassoon seems to have had no interest in women at all (yes, I know he was gay, but he seems to have had no contact with anything female except his aunt, his aunt's servant, and maybe a horse or dog here and there). 2)The first two-thirds of the book were mainly about fox hunting. Really almost every page was about fox hunting. In GREAT DETAIL. 3) What wasn't about fox hunting was about cricket or (in the later sections of the book)golf. Unfortunately I think I was so exhausted and beaten down by the aforementioned first two-thirds of the book, that I wasn't able to fully appreciate the last section, which was about the Great War and his part in it, including his eventual anti-war stance and some time in a hospital with a psychologist because of it. Maybe I should have just read that part. Oh well.
More...