Review: All Quiet on the Western Front

The cover of my copy bills Erich Remarque’s most famous work as “the greatest war novel of all time”. While the blurb on the back suggests the cover design team may not have actually read the book, it’s hard to argue with that judgment after doing so.

Style is hardest to judge, especially in translation, but in A. W. Wheen’s hands Remarque’s narrative flows along easily, snagging occasionally on the commonplace vulgarities of a soldier’s life – soldiers in the barracks, on the parade ground, in the field, the outhouse, the trenches, with women or without. The surprise of this juxtaposition of the literary with the crudities of life is maintained somehow through the end of the work. What is more, it is this novel, I suspect much more than similar devices used less masterfully by Hemmingway or others, that have influenced popular military historical or speculative fiction – at the current time, authors such as Bernard Cornwell, John Ringo, or David Drake – down to the present, whether directly or indirectly.

Thematically, Remarque only offers questions and tensions. The camaraderie of the army is contrasted with the essential brutality and villainy of war; the success of the army in training men to fight is set against the apparent impossibility of veterans fitting back into a normal life; the deep friendships formed under stress are highlighted by the sheer ephemerality of life in a war – especially this one. The narrative follows a German soldier in World War I from – this can be worked out but is not clearly stated – the summer of 1916 through about the end of 1917, with much briefer snapshots through 1918 as the war drew to its close. The majority of the book suggests the private but regular style a man might use keeping a journal; whether the more erratic end of the book intentionally suggests a breakdown or Remarque was just sick of his subject but felt some kind of conclusion was necessary – or both – is hard to tell.

I’ve read no other work that comes close to conveying the horror and degradation of war – so much so that one is even forced to some sympathy, on reflection, for Chamberlain and the other appeasers of the 1930s. It is not strange that it should have seemed worth almost anything to avoid going through “all that” again. It makes one wonder, really, about the whole genre of military fiction that exists for light or “pleasure” reading. David Weber once referred to such works where the heroes suffer no agonies as “military pornography”, but Remarque’s novel makes you wonder whether any work that treats war lightly, as merely a plot or setting or without having some point to make, is much better.

If I were to challenge the cover’s claim, offhand the only work that comes to mind in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels – although Shaara wrote about the officers’ war, while Remarque shows us the private soldier; and Shaara confined himself to one battle fought in a few days, where Remarque takes in a sweep of years.

Notes on a Translation

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is generally considered one of the classic “story books” – collections of stories in the tradition going back at least to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and best represented in English by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Incidentally, Boccaccio appears to have borrowed from Ovid and Chaucer from Boccaccio.

Boccaccio’s framing device for his hundred stories – ten each over ten days – is a retreat of several young women and men from the plague in Florence. The stories tend to titillate – one would be reminded of Kipling’s remark about the thirty-nine stories that cannot be told to women and then one that can, except that Boccaccio dedicates his work to the ladies, so that we can instead meditate on changes in culture and perhaps compare the work more suitably with the phenomenon of the mass-produced romance novel. At any rate there are perhaps fifteen serious stories out of the whole hundred, and of the remainder the ones that are not erotic (and quite a few of the ones that are) feature tricksters as heroes or are simply jokes.

I have no way of judging Boccaccio’s originality. He appears to have a significant place in the history of Italian literary style, writing like Dante in the vernacular. His plague narrative which opens the work probably has some value as a historical source, although one suspects exaggeration. As for the stories, serious efforts have been expended to track his sources, with varying success. For the most part his plots could pass unremarked in any modern work in the appropriate genre, but I don’t know whether to conclude that he played a role in forming modern taste, or that human taste doesn’t change all that much. In one regard he does stand out: the medieval fascination with fortune, good or bad, runs against our current tendency to insist on our own role in charting our course through history.

The translation I have been reading is John Payne’s, which is a work of much learning and very little wit. Payne’s deliberate choice of archaism, even by late 19th century standards, militates against the original vernacular tone. I think Payne expected something a little different when he started the project, as he appears more interested in the work’s historical place and is not particularly impressed by Boccaccio’s style – his footnotes frequently are little more than complaints about colloquial tone, regional usages, or the errors of previous translators. His translation of the preface and its plague account, I think, holds up well.

However, while he understands what a pun is in theory, he has made no effort to duplicate Boccaccio’s wordplay, which is evidently extensive. Admittedly, translating puns is hard, and he does footnote many of the ones that were most obvious in the Italian. But there are other instances where the humor is situational and Payne balks even at that task. For example, in the prologue, after coming up with their scheme, the young women talk the young men into coming along on their retreat, with the supposed reason that male leadership is necessary to any social undertaking. It seems lost on Payne that this is a joke and nothing more than an excuse, as we would say, for one of the girls to invite her boyfriend along.

In short, while Payne in his introduction defends the book’s literary value against the censors, all his instincts seem to be on the side of the censors – not surprising in a Victorian writer, but damaging to the accuracy of the translation in tone if nothing else. Still, Payne’s appears to have been the first complete English translation published without either abridgment of the more scandalous stories or cribbing from French versions, and so he deserves some credit for carrying through his literary project even if we can safely assume modern translations are likely more faithful to Boccaccio’s original work.

20th Century Authors

The Stranger

No. Why? Don’t read it. The first third, maybe, is sympathetic and not entirely unworthwhile look at the world of a man who has trouble expressing “normal” emotions; the rest is downright sociopathic. Camus’s politics make it not entirely implausible to read as an anti-colonialist allegory, if it were ever clear that the author takes issue with his protagonist – from what I can tell, Camus meant nothing so serious and intended only to highlight the “absurdity” of the (modern?) world.

A Farewell to Arms

Some phenomenal scenes of military camaraderie, layered between the stages of relationship tragedy. The narrating protagonists’ self-centered hedonism – a fair mirror of Hemmingway’s own life – is so overwhelming that it dulls not only his own but the readers’ reactions to the final deaths. The man has a reputation as a stylist but it appears that he never met a run-on sentence he didn’t like and the “style” consists of sandwiching really short ones around them. In fairness, this was a fairly early novel, so the style (to say nothing of his perception of the world) may have matured later.

Siddhartha

A sort of appreciation of or commentary on Buddhist and other Indian philosophy, Hermann Hesse’s novel might be considered an extensive development of the saying that experience is the best teacher. What is taught – well, Hesse bypasses enlightenment for “love” – personally never seems to have managed either – but whether his conception of love is trite or profound would need further explication. The story suggests profundity; the ending uncertainty. One half-expects the novel to be merely part of or an the introduction to a dialogue after the manner of The Republic or Utopia – it’s pleasing, worthwhile, yet curiously incomplete.