Late last night I finished reading All Quiet on the Western Front (in English translation). I’ve read a few war/ anti-war books but this one blew me away. I thought it was beautifully written. Remarque convinced me utterly of what he was saying because it was pervaded with a real sense of the writer having lived through it (Remarque did spend some time at the front in WWI). At one point Paul, the narrator, goes home on leave, and his feeling of alienation from his family is superbly described. He also feels alienated from his own life, both his past and his future. Later he talks about falling on his face (I think while he was training) and finding sand on the floor that he just wanted to dig his fingers into.
The battle descriptions are pitched perfectly, conveying the horror of WWI trench warfare, without trying to ‘gross you out’. I think this is the masterpiece of it genre, and would recommend anyone who hasn’t read it to do so as soon as possible.
This was one of the set texts for O-grade English (this covers 14-15 year olds) when I was at school. An excellent, excellent book. We also saw the film in class and the final image of the hand and the butterfly is very powerful.
Yes!!! Fantastic. I love that book for all the reasons mentioned. The only war book that I like better is Catch-22.
All Quiet read like a memoir, until the last sequence. It pointed out the characters’ struggles with the morality of the war (the French soldier) and I especially liked how it pointed out the silliness of the cease-fire agreement and how the jockeying for position afterwards cost lives needlessly.
My students read an abridged version. They are all juvinille offenders in one way or another including gang members. The book even moved them. They disliked the ending and sympathised with the way the young men were treated.
I wish I had readers good enough to read the unabridged version.
Sorry spoke- I’ve been away for a bit. If you are interested the version I’ve got was translated by Brian Murdoch. He obviously has to take a great deal of the credit for the English version, but that is one thing I don’t like about translations, not knowing what was in the original.
Having given it some more thought over the last few days, there are a couple of other things that struck me. It was that it was about ‘the other side’. Intellectually, of course, you’re always aware that for the most part the people on the other side of the barbed wire are as normal as you are, but his book really brings it home.
Also, I loved the way that he (Remarque) conveyed the fact that it’s not the guys doing the fighting that make the war. It’s people high up that, at some point, say, we’re going to have a war here, and millions die. Sure you can say that this or that country started it, but a country is made up of people (the ludicrousness of, as Tjaden points out, the idea of a French mountain being insulted by a German mountain) and someone has to make that decision.
I think for that reason it’s made me more anti-war than ever. The people who say yes or no are not the ones that end up getting their limbs blown off.
Neurotik, I enjoyed Catch 22, but found it all too surreal to be as powerful as Remarque’s book. While there are complexities, All Quiet can easily be read as a simple story of a young man’s fight to survive the war.
“All Quiet On The Western Front”: Excellent book, but I have to find time to re-read it. I haven’t read it in years. We actually were assigned to read it in 10th Grade History as we studied WWI and WWII. Yes, this is a great book!
Just wanted to add to someone’s comment w/o hijacking the thread: “Catch-22”: I read this as a teen, but I found it very dry with patches of humor. Then, as an adult working for the (US) Federal Gov., but not in the military, I found this book all TOO real as that same “square peg in a round hole” thinking seems to have proliferated throughout all Offices of the Federal Government.
Citing from the story: “Why do you put crab apples in your cheeks? To stretch my cheeks! And why do you want to stretch your cheeks? To hold more crab apples!”
It was this kind of thinking that tore apart one great Group within the Dept. We worked like a well-oiled machine within the Federal Gov., but I guess we were just too proficient! My boss (and our group) ranked #1 for four years straight across the entire Dept. As he came up on being ranked #1 for the fifth year in a row, which would have meant a major promotion, the superiors HAD to shoot him down. So, basically, they changed the rules on him…just like the main character in Catch-22 trying to fly enough missions to retire (IIRC)…and they said something totally bogus like “he’s not holding enough crab apples in his cheeks to deserve the award again”.
Don’t laugh, my friend, this way of thinking is very real!
You gotta read Catch-22 and then go work in government to really appreciate this…or enlist!
Another one here who hasn’t read the book, but who thinks the movie is among the greatest films ever made. It’s in my lifetime top 100, and it’s pretty high on the list.
The original is great for its breakthrough nature. Before they did some reworking of it in the early 90’s though, it was hard to watch. This was made when they still hadn’t gotten sound down very well and the battle scenes were hampered by one track sound. So what they did was alternate sounds, you’d hear shouts of men, then the pop of machine guns, and then the sound of shells exploding. Never all all at once, until they reworked it.
The movie has some impressive effects for its time. ‘Shells’ explode mere inches in front of charging soldiers. (more a sign of the times than any effect though), and a barrage from the enemy lines when the boys are laying wire is an effect that stuck with me.
The acting is poor, but earnest. Its hard to describe, but usually bad acting comes a lack of caring by the actors. These people genuinely want to tell the story, but film acting is still a bit new at that time.
The soldiers in the background, if you examine them closely and know what you are looking for, you realise these people know what they are doing. Especially the machine gun crews. Methinks a few vets were hired.
The later version was a 70’s made-for-TV movie starring Ernest Borgnine, that guy who played John-boy on the Waltons, and a host of British actors. It works very well with excellent acting and narrative. It suffers from a lower budget however. A plane is represented by a shadow, and there is a lack of explosive. i.e. the devastating wall of landing shells is missing.
I really enjoyed reading All Quiet On the Western Front. It was required reading for a class. I started out just zipping through it. After a few pages I was hooked. I had read an anti-war novel a couple years before the name of which I can not remember. Maybe it was Jonny Get Your Gun? It was about a man injured in WWI who has no face, arms, or legs. And I felt that All Quiet was a much more powerful anti-war novel in that it seems to not force disgust towards war, but everything is presented so bluntly that you develop the disgust on your own. After that I was required to read Brave New World. I loved that so much that I thought maybe there is something to this reading classics. Then a friend convinced me to read Catch-22. Too tell the truth I hated it. Maybe I’m just dumb but it confused me a lot. In about fifty pages I was ready to burn the stupid book. I did eventually make it through the whole thing. It was actually easier to read near the end. At this point I had a decent handle on the situation. One thing that really got to me though is the incredibly dark scene near the end. I believe it’s near when the prostitute is killed. When the character is on the streets and he sees amazing cruelty and a mans teeth get knocked out. That part is just scary.
Thanks detop for the link and and Mr. Miskatonic for the description. The only thing is, it’ s impossible to find these films to hire. I had to buy 2001: A Space Odyssey recently because I can’t hire it anywhere. Still, it seems to me that * All Quiet* is worth looking for.