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borisignatievich 's review for:
The good soldier Švejk and his fortunes in the world war
by Jaroslav Hašek
The tale of a Czech soldier in the army of the Austro-Hungarian army during the first world war, this is both very long at 750+ pages and incomplete, due to the untimely demise of Hasek in 1923. I started reading it last spring, and while it is very well written (and presumably very well translated), I couldn't get into it at all. After about 200 pages, I started to see glimpses of why it is often heralded as a ancestor of Catch-22, but I was finding it a huge slog. It prompted this exchange at the time;
I wrote:
On 'the Good Soldier Svejk' atm. Not really enjoying it. First 200 pages were , it's improved a bit - to the point where I can see why it's heralded as a forerunner to Catch 22, but still not really liking it.
Scruff wrote:
Yeah I struggled. Got to about 5/600 pages and moved onto something else. It's wonderfully written, but there's only so many times I can read:
Svejk gets in a bit of bother
Svejk bores his captor with an anecdote
Captor becomes enraged
Svejk gets in trouble with captor's superior
Svejk is ok again
And I agreed entirely with Scruff. I made it to the end of part 2, 450 pages in, then set it aside. As part of the "clear my backlog" book challenge I've set for this year, I picked it up again recently with a certain amount of trepidation. Whether it was the break or a change in the book, I much preferred the second half. I think the issue parts one and two had was that every few pages the entire supporting cast would change, as Svejk would move to a different village to meet new guys in the pub and get into trouble with someone else. O the flip side, part three finds the company he belongs to on a long train journey, and settles down on a central cast of about 10 guys, split between the officers and their staffs.
I think this made it much better, because you got to know some of the other characters in a way I felt never happened in the first half of the book, and the comedy was then knowing how they would react and seeing it unfold anyway. Rather than the pointless anecdotes of Svejk being the driver of the comedy, they transformed into a vessel to laugh at the others just as Lt. Dub or Baloun. After this, even when the book again resorted to taking Svejk somewhere new, I thought it worked much better. Or I just came at it much fresher than the first half
Either way, it's well written, and there are plenty of funny moments in here, it's just that much of it is hidden behind a slog of repetitive situations that grate a little after a while.
6/10 as a provisional rating, I may go back and read the first half again at some point to see if it's as bad as I remember
PS: Some of the pictures are brilliant tbf
I wrote:
On 'the Good Soldier Svejk' atm. Not really enjoying it. First 200 pages were , it's improved a bit - to the point where I can see why it's heralded as a forerunner to Catch 22, but still not really liking it.
Scruff wrote:
Yeah I struggled. Got to about 5/600 pages and moved onto something else. It's wonderfully written, but there's only so many times I can read:
Svejk gets in a bit of bother
Svejk bores his captor with an anecdote
Captor becomes enraged
Svejk gets in trouble with captor's superior
Svejk is ok again
And I agreed entirely with Scruff. I made it to the end of part 2, 450 pages in, then set it aside. As part of the "clear my backlog" book challenge I've set for this year, I picked it up again recently with a certain amount of trepidation. Whether it was the break or a change in the book, I much preferred the second half. I think the issue parts one and two had was that every few pages the entire supporting cast would change, as Svejk would move to a different village to meet new guys in the pub and get into trouble with someone else. O the flip side, part three finds the company he belongs to on a long train journey, and settles down on a central cast of about 10 guys, split between the officers and their staffs.
I think this made it much better, because you got to know some of the other characters in a way I felt never happened in the first half of the book, and the comedy was then knowing how they would react and seeing it unfold anyway. Rather than the pointless anecdotes of Svejk being the driver of the comedy, they transformed into a vessel to laugh at the others just as Lt. Dub or Baloun. After this, even when the book again resorted to taking Svejk somewhere new, I thought it worked much better. Or I just came at it much fresher than the first half
Either way, it's well written, and there are plenty of funny moments in here, it's just that much of it is hidden behind a slog of repetitive situations that grate a little after a while.
6/10 as a provisional rating, I may go back and read the first half again at some point to see if it's as bad as I remember
PS: Some of the pictures are brilliant tbf