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literaturejuggle 's review for:
The Bridge On The River Kwai
by Pierre Boulle
The edition I read is part of an omnibus (which doesn't even mention that it's a translation!). I've read this story twice now but I can't say that I enjoyed it. It is so heavily satire that the narration remains cold and distant from the plot and characters. While it is a fairly readable story, it's all about observation and a lot of psychological discussion on how a man's mind works, without ever letting the reader get involved in the actual plot or get to know the characters. Sometimes the prose was very dry and hard going, but I don't know if this is Boulle or the translator at fault. The structure is rather odd, starting off viewing the POWs and their captors from the perspective of the MO Clipton, but then seeming to forget he exists and then later becomes almost entirely from the perspective of the commandoes, so we stop getting any insights into how the prisoners are faring. Action is generally told second-hand, with a character describing to another what they did yesterday, rather than straight from the narrator to the reader, which created that distance between the audience and the story that I didn't like. My mind wandered a lot during the dives into psychology. All of the characters are described as figures of ridicule (with the possible exception of Clipton), so you can't really care about any of them. Since Boulle (French) was inspired by his own experiences as a POW, I'm not sure why he chose to make the main characters British, because the whole story only seems to work as a satire on the faults of the British rather than a story about collaboration with the enemy etc. And of course the ending is bleak, so overall there was nothing much to enjoy here. It is readable though and particularly towards the start, quite an interesting story.