Reading Assignment Challenge - January Complete

I have read both of the books I chose for January in the Reading Assignment Challenge: All Quiet on the Western Front on January 2 and Birdsong today.

This is only the second book I have read this year but I have to say it is a favorite.  I have had this book on my shelves for years and I thought I had read it, but as I perused my shelves for this challenge, I picked it up and flipped through it realizing I had no idea what it was about.  If I have in fact read it previously then my mind must have been elsewhere.

As mentioned with All Quiet on the Western Front, I have been on a World War I kick.  This is set during the war but it does flash forward to 1978.  Not only is this a war story, but it is a love story which in itself is somewhat a war story.

The protagonist is Stephen Wraysford.  As the novel opens he leaves England to visit a factory in France.  While he lives with the factory owner's family, he has an affair with the wife.  Eventually they leave together, but when she discovers she is pregnant she leaves him.  The other story involves their granddaughter in 1978.  The remaining six sections of the book go back and forth with World War I and Elizabeth's search to find out more about her grandfather.

The tragedy of the war is compounded with the tragedy of Stephen's life.  At times the book is truly heartbreaking.

"No one in England knows what this is like.  If they could see the way these men live they would not believe their eyes.  The is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded."

From Amazon

Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.

FrFrom Publishers Weekly

In 1910, England's Stephen Wraysford, a junior executive in a textile firm, is sent by his company to northern France. There he falls for Isabelle Azaire, a young and beautiful matron who abandons her abusive husband and sticks by Stephen long enough to conceive a child. Six years later, Stephen is back in France, as a British officer fighting in the trenches. Facing death, embittered by isolation, he steels himself against thoughts of love. But despite rampant disease, harrowing tunnel explosions and desperate attacks on highly fortified German positions, he manages to survive, and to meet with Isabelle again. The emotions roiled up by this meeting, however, threaten to ruin him as a soldier. Everything about this novel, which was a bestseller in England, is outsized, from its epic, if occasionally ramshackle, narrative to its gruesome and utterly convincing descriptions of battlefield horrors. Faulks (A Fool's Alphabet) proves himself a grand storyteller here. Enlivened with considerable historical detail related through accomplished prose, his narrative flows with a pleasingly appropriate recklessness that brings his characters to dynamic life.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

All Quiet on the Western Front

"The cries continued.  It is not men, they would not cry so terribly.
      'Wounded horses,' says Kat.
It's unendurable.  It is the moaning of the world, it is martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning....
The screaming of the beasts becomes louder.  One can no longer distinguish whence in this now quiet silvery landscape it comes; ghostly, invisible, it is everywhere, between heaven and earth it rolls on immeasurable."

I'm not sure why this description from everything stuck with me except that it stuck with the men as well.  The death, the wounding, the waste of everything and the meaninglessness of it all is emphasized in the destruction of these animals.

Erich Maria Remarque fought in World War I.  This is his reflection.  It is not a memoir, only his impressions.  On more than one occasion he wonders through his characters reactions if both sides of soldiers are simply innocent machines fighting on the orders of nameless, faceless "leaders."  The British soldiers in the Anne Perry Series wonder the same thing.  Both groups recognize the humanity of their foes.  That by far is the saddest part of this novel.  The soldiers we were taught were the enemies were victims as were the soldiers of the allies.

I was also touched by how difficult it was fro the main character, Paul Baumer to return to his home on leave.  No one knows quite how to behave.  No one knows quite what to discuss.  He doesn't seem to belong anymore.  He can't wait to return to the front and his friends.

This is not a very long book.  It is a translation and for the most part it reads smoothly.  There was only one instance that I felt needed a footnote.  Baumer and his friend encounter the teacher who encouraged them to enlist.  He is now also a soldier but they refer to him as "Territorial" Kantorek.  It is used clearly as some sort of rank but I had never heard of it.  With a little reaseach (thank goodness for google) I found out that it is a soldier of the "reserve."  He was considered lower than regular army.  Anyway, a footnote would have been easier.

I recommend this for a look at the other side of World War I.  I may have been able to include this on the Banned Book Challenge because this was the first book the Nazis banned when they began their book burning campaign.

From Amazon.com

"Considered by many the greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece of the German experience during World War I.

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . .

This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.

Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another . . .  if only he can come out of the war alive.

“The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.”—The New York Times Book Review