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A review by varunob
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
German writer Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is considered a colossus of a novel, whether in regard to the war genre or simply for the human story it has to tell. I’m incredibly fascinated by wars and a lot of my time is spent reading up about them but the real reason behind wanting to read All Quiet… was that it examined the mind of a combat soldier – a German soldier to boot – in World War I, a time little is spoken about these days simply because it is difficult to view it with the sort of perspective it requires in 2018 which, coincidentally, happens to be the centenary of the war’s end.
I obviously did not know what I was getting myself into. I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that All Quiet… is the most disturbing and the most beautiful book I’ve read. It was one of the books I picked up on one of my sprees last year and decided to kick May off with it. It’s a pretty slim volume, about 200-odd pages. And it still took me a week to finish.
In a nutshell, the book is the story of Paul Bäumer, a schoolboy who, along with his friends, was goaded into joining the Army when the clouds of war assembled over Europe. He is one of the million young men of whom it was expected and sometimes even demanded that they put their lives on the line by people who wouldn’t be fighting themselves. In Paul’s case, this person happens to be his schoolmaster. And so these young men go off to fight a war they know nothing about, against enemy soldiers with whom they have more in common than their own Kaiser Wilhelm.
The narrative is entirely from Paul’s perspective, so the reader gets to see first-hand what it was like to be in the trenches, to be in hospital, to be away from the line, to get leave. Remarque’s vivid descriptions of war inform one not only of Paul’s experiences but of Remarque’s own familiarity with the bloodshed, the loss of brothers-in-arms, the shellings, the towns in the hinterland, the hospital ward etc.
And despite all of what Remarque shows us by way of Paul’s life as a soldier, one cannot think for a moment that the book glorifies war. It is about war and the effect it has on soldiers but there is no chest-thumping jingoism about how this is service to the nation etcetera etcetera. We are often told that war is bad, but do we actually believe it? So many of us are warmongers, maybe passively, but warmongers all the same. I know I was itching for one after the Uri Terror Attack, to the effect that why should confrontations be this way, why don’t we open it out for once and for all and be done with it? Quite selfish since it’s not me putting my life on the line. One can argue, of course, that soldiers know what they have signed up for and if death comes, they should be ready for it. Perhaps, but why should anyone – not just soldiers, but also people who live in areas like RS Pura near Jammu where every other day there is bombardment from the other side – suffer because some of us – mainly politicians and corporates – are itching for war. And let’s not forget the economic toll of a full-fledged war – it will take a nation ages to recover and stabilise.
The book also depicts – albeit briefly – what a soldier experiences when he is away from the front on a spot of leave. We know the shell shock – or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – a large number of soldiers suffered from and while I am not quite sure as to whether Paul’s experiences in his hometown while on leave would count as a symptom of the disorder, it is an insight into how an entire generation would, post-1918, struggle to fit into a way of life and a scheme of things since their formative years had been spent fighting a war and their world-view is formed by those experiences of theirs.
A word here for Brian Murdoch, who has translated the book from the original German (titled "Im Westen nichts Neues"). Nothing is lost in translation and though I admit to not having read a word of the German version, the prose is marvellously written.
All Quiet on the Western Front is likely to haunt you once you put it down but it is a book everyone must read. In times like these – when two of the world’s most powerful countries are governed by loonies, when a terror organisation is attempting to take control of entire nations, when the alt-right and alt-left are at the crux of destroying all that men and women fought for in the twentieth century – it is imperative that we remember the repercussions of war and the cost of it too.
I obviously did not know what I was getting myself into. I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that All Quiet… is the most disturbing and the most beautiful book I’ve read. It was one of the books I picked up on one of my sprees last year and decided to kick May off with it. It’s a pretty slim volume, about 200-odd pages. And it still took me a week to finish.
In a nutshell, the book is the story of Paul Bäumer, a schoolboy who, along with his friends, was goaded into joining the Army when the clouds of war assembled over Europe. He is one of the million young men of whom it was expected and sometimes even demanded that they put their lives on the line by people who wouldn’t be fighting themselves. In Paul’s case, this person happens to be his schoolmaster. And so these young men go off to fight a war they know nothing about, against enemy soldiers with whom they have more in common than their own Kaiser Wilhelm.
The narrative is entirely from Paul’s perspective, so the reader gets to see first-hand what it was like to be in the trenches, to be in hospital, to be away from the line, to get leave. Remarque’s vivid descriptions of war inform one not only of Paul’s experiences but of Remarque’s own familiarity with the bloodshed, the loss of brothers-in-arms, the shellings, the towns in the hinterland, the hospital ward etc.
And despite all of what Remarque shows us by way of Paul’s life as a soldier, one cannot think for a moment that the book glorifies war. It is about war and the effect it has on soldiers but there is no chest-thumping jingoism about how this is service to the nation etcetera etcetera. We are often told that war is bad, but do we actually believe it? So many of us are warmongers, maybe passively, but warmongers all the same. I know I was itching for one after the Uri Terror Attack, to the effect that why should confrontations be this way, why don’t we open it out for once and for all and be done with it? Quite selfish since it’s not me putting my life on the line. One can argue, of course, that soldiers know what they have signed up for and if death comes, they should be ready for it. Perhaps, but why should anyone – not just soldiers, but also people who live in areas like RS Pura near Jammu where every other day there is bombardment from the other side – suffer because some of us – mainly politicians and corporates – are itching for war. And let’s not forget the economic toll of a full-fledged war – it will take a nation ages to recover and stabilise.
The book also depicts – albeit briefly – what a soldier experiences when he is away from the front on a spot of leave. We know the shell shock – or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – a large number of soldiers suffered from and while I am not quite sure as to whether Paul’s experiences in his hometown while on leave would count as a symptom of the disorder, it is an insight into how an entire generation would, post-1918, struggle to fit into a way of life and a scheme of things since their formative years had been spent fighting a war and their world-view is formed by those experiences of theirs.
A word here for Brian Murdoch, who has translated the book from the original German (titled "Im Westen nichts Neues"). Nothing is lost in translation and though I admit to not having read a word of the German version, the prose is marvellously written.
All Quiet on the Western Front is likely to haunt you once you put it down but it is a book everyone must read. In times like these – when two of the world’s most powerful countries are governed by loonies, when a terror organisation is attempting to take control of entire nations, when the alt-right and alt-left are at the crux of destroying all that men and women fought for in the twentieth century – it is imperative that we remember the repercussions of war and the cost of it too.