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A couple of serious omissions:
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.
Perhaps the most important novel to bloodily emerge from WWII - (almost) certainly my favourite. Based on Mailer's own experiences it charts a US assault on a Japanese-held, rainy, malaria-ridden Pacific island via the experiences of an often crude, cruel, misanthropic and brutally realistic cast of characters. There are two main strands: one charts the painful progress of an impossible and futile mission carried out by ordinary soldiers; the other records an ongoing debate between the young, idealistic, Marxist Lieutenant Hearn and his cynical, savage, libertarian superior - Colonel Cummings. The doomed mission is recorded in exacting detail via the increasingly bleak thoughts, obsessions, comments and observations of the men who endure it, while the debate sees Hearn being verbally and ideologically torn apart by the older man. As a double assault on the reader it is fucking harsh, uncompromising and unremitting but also utterly beautiful. You want to read this book - but make sure you've got someone or something reassurring to cuddle up with afterwards - I guarantee some sleepless nights if you've got even a single cc of warm blood in your body.
Um, perhaps a bit more hopeful:
The Roads to Freedom trilogy by Jean-Paul Sartre (The Age of Reason, The Reprieve and Iron in the Soul).
Most people don't automatically think of Sartre as a soldier but he fought for France in WWII, was captured by the Germans, released due to poor health in '41 (he wrote his first fiction, a play, for other POWs to perform while imprisoned) and on return immediately joined the Resistance for which he continued to fight until the end of the war. His experiences informed a lot of his philosophy and provided the basis for his and Simone de Beauvoir's lifelong campaign against Fascism (and fascism).
The Age of Reason begins in Paris in 1938 - to quote from the blurb: 'city of night clubs and galleries, community of students, communists and homosexuals, world of intellect and degradation' (c'mon, don't you just love it already?). It's a city gripped by fear of the increasingly certain threat of war and the trilogy charts the hope and terror, the dissipation and lethargy and desperate longing, and the eventual necessary resolution of its cast (most especially the dissolute, drunken wastrel Mathieu - its largely autobiographical main character), plus the horror of those who stood by or ran, or those who collaborated. As you'd expect the style of narration is (again) fairly bleak and uncompromising, but it doesn't judge out of hand, the characters are beautifully drawn and it's also perceptive, profound, moving and, well, important - plus it's sooooo Barbelith - and it's fucking Sartre, and it'll look good on your bookshelf, and I guarantee that it will impress any potential (or current) sexual partners.
You know you want it. |
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