A review by blueyorkie
1919 by John Dos Passos

4.0

The second part of the trilogy of Dos Passos, USA, begins with an approximation. 1919, such as its title, is not a question of it. The characters embody the different ways Americans got involved in the Great War and incorporated them into the Red Cross, the merchant navy, the front, and the rear. The novel had marked by the narrative technique used in 42nd Parallel: fictionalised history, the method of collage of headlines, local chronicles, popular songs, biographies of figures in American history, and autobiographical flashes. Despite the gravity of the historical background, the work takes place on a piano rhythm, less hectic than the first, reflecting a country's incomplete fermentation. The novel is no longer American in that it no longer takes place mainly in the New World; it is the meeting of all these destinies with the Old Continent, its culture, and its art of living. Its main interest lies in the personal confrontation of individuals with France, Italy and especially Paris. Some will develop an unfailing love for our country. Some will get lost in it, and others will return, not quite the same, to a country that has changed—dominated by economic forces, trusts, big business, where the 'We now hunt for pacifists, for reds that we call yellows. This opus is the story of what was called the Lost Generation. We inevitably think of Ernest Hemingway and Francis Scott Fitzgerald; it is also the sublimated experience of the author himself. So lost, we are also a bit lost in front of the proliferation of beings that it is difficult to follow from time to time and whose destinies intersect: this opus is the midpoint of a titanic, original work, which requires a reading diligent, at the risk of getting lost in all this novelistic corpus, of seeing his involvement, his interest and his understanding weaken significantly—a demanding read.