"I tell you it is the vilest baseness to use horses in this war"
The best book I've read all year--and probably this decade--is All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. It's hauntingly beautiful and horrific at the same time. The descriptions are so vivid, and yet they are all about death, depair, living death of people without hope.
People call it an anti-war novel, which I suppose it is, but it's not a political novel in any way. Reading it is entering into another world. A world in which you care more about a dead man's boots than the fact that the man is dying. A world in which a double ration of food is a great thing, even if it's only because the army is slow in realizing half your company died yesterday. The narrator is accustomed to this, which makes it all so much worse.
The narrator dies at the end. The book doesn't say what of. But it's clear the war killed him long before that, even though the hollow shell of his body continued to move.
Today was our book club meeting. Most everyone felt the same way about the book, but since we all agreed, there wasn't much discussion.
(The title quote is from the book, said by a friend of the narrator.)
People call it an anti-war novel, which I suppose it is, but it's not a political novel in any way. Reading it is entering into another world. A world in which you care more about a dead man's boots than the fact that the man is dying. A world in which a double ration of food is a great thing, even if it's only because the army is slow in realizing half your company died yesterday. The narrator is accustomed to this, which makes it all so much worse.
The narrator dies at the end. The book doesn't say what of. But it's clear the war killed him long before that, even though the hollow shell of his body continued to move.
Today was our book club meeting. Most everyone felt the same way about the book, but since we all agreed, there wasn't much discussion.
(The title quote is from the book, said by a friend of the narrator.)