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mburnamfink 's review for:
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
What can my small words add to All Quiet on the Western Front? My edition is subtitled "the greatest war novel of all time", and as someone who reads a lot of military history and memoir, that is absolutely true.
Paul Baumer is a military everyman, a good student who enlisted in the German Army in a flush of patriotism along with his class. He had only his school books and some vague romantic notions of a life. And now after time in the trenches, he doesn't even have that. His generation is one that has had their innocent and purpose stolen, murdered, raped, by the pride of politicians and errors of diplomatic judgement.
The story spools out over loosely connected scenes. Behind the lines, the front, gas, on leave, back again, wounded, forward, and a final futile stand. The writing is elegant, earthy and yet oddly delicate at times, and with intimate knowledge of what a soldier really cares about: what he might eat, the terribly frailty of the human body against the power of war.
Modernity was born out of the war, a mass murder which took some kind of innocence from the world, along with the lives of millions of men across Europe. I can't help by compare this book to Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and Remarque is both more expressive and more romantic. There's an elegiac sense of loss that pervades this book, a terrible grief.
There but for the grace of god goes us.
Paul Baumer is a military everyman, a good student who enlisted in the German Army in a flush of patriotism along with his class. He had only his school books and some vague romantic notions of a life. And now after time in the trenches, he doesn't even have that. His generation is one that has had their innocent and purpose stolen, murdered, raped, by the pride of politicians and errors of diplomatic judgement.
The story spools out over loosely connected scenes. Behind the lines, the front, gas, on leave, back again, wounded, forward, and a final futile stand. The writing is elegant, earthy and yet oddly delicate at times, and with intimate knowledge of what a soldier really cares about: what he might eat, the terribly frailty of the human body against the power of war.
Modernity was born out of the war, a mass murder which took some kind of innocence from the world, along with the lives of millions of men across Europe. I can't help by compare this book to Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and Remarque is both more expressive and more romantic. There's an elegiac sense of loss that pervades this book, a terrible grief.
There but for the grace of god goes us.