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isobelvm 's review for:
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
"We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war."
This novel is haunting. Heart-wrenching. Devastating. But so, so beautifully written. This is the WWI book, painting the war vividly in all of its horror and all of its meaninglessness. I hardly know how to articulate how truly exquisite this novel is, for all that it is equal parts tragic.
I'll attempt to do so by explaining a bit about my personal relationship to the history of the First World War. I studied it extensively at school - the political causes of the war, the military and political events during it, the events afterwards leading to WWII, so on - and know the facts and figures, the generals and offensives and tactics, intimately enough that I scored 100% on my final exam. I could argue why General Haig may be excused from his infamous title of 'The Butcher of the Somme', and yet also why he shouldn't be; explain the events of the Ludendorff Offensive down to the detail; describe the Schlieffen Plan and why it failed; and demonstrate a strong working knowledge of the structure of trench warfare. In reading this novel, however, all of these things I'd learned and regurgitated to back up points I was making in my essays stopped being facts I'd memorised and started becoming real human experiences. They started becoming eulogies and obituaries to the lost generation, apologies for all they experienced and the fact that they weren't the last to, either. The numbers and the statistics were suddenly real people, with names and faces and nervous ticks and stories cut off much, much too prematurely.
The first-person present tense narrative (which I'm generally not much a fan of) makes the experience of the trenches of WWI arresting. Our everyman protagonist, Paul Bäumer, weaves a narrative full of life, even when the world around him is devoid of it. The fondness with which he speaks of his brothers in arms is immensely moving. The entire novel is an elegy of unbridled sorrow. It speaks to the inherent tragedy in the human condition - in the hubris of human nature and how treacherous it can be - and the senselessness of war.
What an absolutely stunning novel. Its simplicity and yet simultaneous complexity makes it a coup of modern war fiction. Full of horror and tragedy and yet an undeniable spark of life, the stubbornness to survive even when it is unclear what there is left of the world worth fighting for, I am yet to find a novel which achieves such a powerful punch to the gut as this one. If there's a book which needs to be read by absolutely everyone, this is it.
This novel is haunting. Heart-wrenching. Devastating. But so, so beautifully written. This is the WWI book, painting the war vividly in all of its horror and all of its meaninglessness. I hardly know how to articulate how truly exquisite this novel is, for all that it is equal parts tragic.
I'll attempt to do so by explaining a bit about my personal relationship to the history of the First World War. I studied it extensively at school - the political causes of the war, the military and political events during it, the events afterwards leading to WWII, so on - and know the facts and figures, the generals and offensives and tactics, intimately enough that I scored 100% on my final exam. I could argue why General Haig may be excused from his infamous title of 'The Butcher of the Somme', and yet also why he shouldn't be; explain the events of the Ludendorff Offensive down to the detail; describe the Schlieffen Plan and why it failed; and demonstrate a strong working knowledge of the structure of trench warfare. In reading this novel, however, all of these things I'd learned and regurgitated to back up points I was making in my essays stopped being facts I'd memorised and started becoming real human experiences. They started becoming eulogies and obituaries to the lost generation, apologies for all they experienced and the fact that they weren't the last to, either. The numbers and the statistics were suddenly real people, with names and faces and nervous ticks and stories cut off much, much too prematurely.
The first-person present tense narrative (which I'm generally not much a fan of) makes the experience of the trenches of WWI arresting. Our everyman protagonist, Paul Bäumer, weaves a narrative full of life, even when the world around him is devoid of it. The fondness with which he speaks of his brothers in arms is immensely moving. The entire novel is an elegy of unbridled sorrow. It speaks to the inherent tragedy in the human condition - in the hubris of human nature and how treacherous it can be - and the senselessness of war.
What an absolutely stunning novel. Its simplicity and yet simultaneous complexity makes it a coup of modern war fiction. Full of horror and tragedy and yet an undeniable spark of life, the stubbornness to survive even when it is unclear what there is left of the world worth fighting for, I am yet to find a novel which achieves such a powerful punch to the gut as this one. If there's a book which needs to be read by absolutely everyone, this is it.