{"id":7505,"date":"2023-06-08T04:07:54","date_gmt":"2023-06-08T08:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=7505"},"modified":"2023-07-16T14:26:44","modified_gmt":"2023-07-16T18:26:44","slug":"war-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/war-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic War Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

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If you caught the recent Netflix film All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em> and wondered about the book it’s based on, don’t hesitate to get the handsome Everyman’s Library edition. You’ll see why it’s considered one of the greatest war novels every written and more than that, you’ll be amazed at how it doesn’t sound translated.\u00a0 The prose is that clear, that vivid, that compelling. Translation, bringing a book into another language and its culture, is an art and this version of the book is incredibly artful.

The story is simple and complex. Paul and his German schoolmates are basically bullied into signing up for the German army by their jingoistic teacher.\u00a0 However patriotic they are, life in the trenches changes them utterly.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Life and death aren’t topics to read about and discuss: they are both majestic and ephemeral. You can be killed at any minute by a sniper, an artillery shell, a mine–or crushed by a tank. Conversely, you can miraculously escape death by stepping out of a bunker for a smoke or an errand.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

The fear, the tension, the horror of seeing people die in myriad grotesque ways are like an acid bath.\u00a0 The dark realizations hit him early and hard:<\/p>\r\n

“We are no longer young men.\u00a0 We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world.\u00a0 We are refugees.\u00a0 We are fleeing from ourselves.\u00a0 From our lives.\u00a0 We were eighteen years old and we had just begun to love the world and being in it; but we had to shoot at it.\u00a0 The first shell to land went straight for our hearts.\u00a0 We’ve been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress.\u00a0 We don’t believe in those things anymore; we believe in the war.”<\/p>\r\n

Paul experiences one horror after another, loses friends, is wounded, has to kill or be killed, and one of the most amazing chapters of the book is the time he’s trapped for three days in a shell crater with a dying man.\u00a0 But there are also surprisingly moving and even comic moments of camaraderie as he and his fellow soldiers bond around incredible events that soon become ordinary.<\/p>\r\n

The novel is short, fast-paced, devastating and seems oddly current, given the network of trenches that Russia has built in occupied Ukraine.\u00a0 Anyone interested in the history of WWI or amazing fiction should read this book. \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Lev Raphael’s introduction to WWI was via a classic, The Guns of August<\/em>, which he read one summer between sixth and seventh grade.\u00a0 He recently learned that his paternal grandfather, murdered at Auschwitz, fought in that war.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

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 <\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you caught the recent Netflix film All Quiet on the Western Front and wondered about the book it’s based on, don’t hesitate to get the handsome Everyman’s Library edition. You’ll see why it’s considered one of the greatest war novels every written and more than that, you’ll be amazed at how it doesn’t sound … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[877,2],"tags":[2037,339,785,903,2833,2834,2835,2831,902,2665,2837,2836,2832,2716],"class_list":["post-7505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-writing","tag-auschwitz","tag-france","tag-germany","tag-russia","tag-soldiers","tag-tanks","tag-the-guns-of-august","tag-trench-warfare","tag-ukraine","tag-war","tag-war-fiction","tag-war-novels","tag-world-war-i","tag-wwi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7505"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7645,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7505\/revisions\/7645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}