I'd go for knowing grins. The book starts so engagingly, with a delicious black humour, darkly absurd situations, concise prose and fast pace that you're a hundred pages in before you've even thought about how to read it. One of those rare things where you can just sit back and utterly surrender to the author's hand, with the confidence that he won't disappoint you on the way.
Shall we talk about the book a bit? Here's a fairly unperceptive comment from me to get the ball limping misshapenly: I think the thing that most impressed me on my second reading (about 2 years ago) is the way Heller shifts from bleak humour to just real bleakness, loses the knowing smile to let loose some true disgust at the pointlessness of war, without you ever really noticing the direction he's heading in until you're there. There's no big signpost saying "fun's over, serious commentary now", it just happens. |
