A few of you have already been wondering whether or not there will be another Literature and War Readalong. As you can see, there will be another one, but, like last year, it will be a mini-edition, although I included one book more.
February, Monday 29
Storm Warning: Echoes of Conflict by Vanessa Gebbie, 120 pages, UK, 2010, WWII
Here’s the blurb:
Storm Warning explores the echoes and aftershocks of human conflict in a series of powerful stories in which the characters are tested, sometimes to breaking point. Gebbie pulls no punches, exploring the after-effects of atrocity and sometimes, the seeds of atrocity itself.
March, Thursday 31
1914 – 14 by Jean Echenoz, 120 pages France 2012, WWI
Here’s the blurb:
Jean Echenoz turns his attention to the deathtrap of World War I in 1914. Five Frenchmen go off to war, two of them leaving behind young women who long for their return. But the main character in this brilliant novel is the Great War itself. Echenoz, whose work has been compared to that of writers as diverse as Joseph Conrad and Laurence Sterne, leads us gently from a balmy summer day deep into the relentless – and, one hundred years later, still unthinkable – carnage of trench warfare.
May, Tuesday 31
The Hunters by James Salter, 233 pages, US 1957, War in Korea
Here’s the blurb:
Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea with a single goal: to become an ace, one of that elite fraternity of jet pilots who have downed five MIGs. But as his fellow airmen rack up kill after kill – sometimes under dubious circumstances – Cleve’s luck runs bad. Other pilots question his guts. Cleve comes to question himself. And then in one icy instant 40,000 feet above the Yalu River, his luck changes forever. Filled with courage and despair, eerie beauty and corrosive rivalry, James Salter’s luminous first novel is a landmark masterpiece in the literature of war.
September, Friday 30
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, 307 pages, US 2012, War in Iraq
Here’s the blurb:
His whole nation is celebrating what is the worst day of his life
Nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn is home from Iraq. And he’s a hero. Billy and the rest of Bravo Company were filmed defeating Iraqi insurgents in a ferocious firefight. Now Bravo’s three minutes of extreme bravery is a YouTube sensation and the Bush Administration has sent them on a nationwide Victory Tour.
During the final hours of the tour Billy will mix with the rich and powerful, endure the politics and praise of his fellow Americans – and fall in love. He’ll face hard truths about life and death, family and friendship, honor and duty.
Tomorrow he must go back to war.
November, Friday 25
All For Nothing – Alles umsonst by Walter Kempowski, 352 pages, Germany 2006, WWII
Here’s the blurb:
Winter, January 1945. It is cold and dark, and the German army is retreating from the Russian advance. Germans are fleeing the occupied territories in their thousands, in cars and carts and on foot. But in a rural East Prussian manor house, the wealthy von Globig family tries to seal itself off from the world. Peter von Globig is twelve, and feigns a cough to get out of his Hitler Youth duties, preferring to sledge behind the house and look at snowflakes through his microscope. His father Eberhard is stationed in Italy – a desk job safe from the front – and his bookish and musical mother Katharina has withdrawn into herself. Instead the house is run by a conservative, frugal aunt, helped by two Ukrainian maids and an energetic Pole. Protected by their privileged lifestyle from the deprivation and chaos around them, and caught in the grip of indecision, they make no preparations to leave, until Katharina’s decision to harbor a stranger for the night begins their undoing. Superbly expressive and strikingly vivid, sympathetic yet painfully honest about the motivations of its characters, All for Nothing is a devastating portrait of the self-delusions, complicities and denials of the German people as the Third Reich comes to an end.
*******
Five books from four countries, covering four different wars. The books are all rather short and quite diverse. For the first time, I have included a collection of short stories. And I included the first novel on the war in Korea.
As always, I hope that many of you will feel tempted to join me.
