Andy's review
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
Andy's review
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Andy's review
rating:
A high school standard but I can't imagine I would have understood this fully in high school and I'm glad nobody assigned it to me then. A gruelingly painful, mournful book. The writing is resolutely unpretentious and yet incredibly effective in its descriptions both of battle and of states of mind. I'm not really sure how he pulls it off. The portrait of a man feeling irredeemably divorced from his past and his future is heartbreakingly vivid. If literature is meant to offer us experiences that we will never otherwise have, this confrontation with the nature of war and of mortality seems a very important experience to have. I can understand why teachers think high schoolers should be put through it. But when I was in high school I was immune to most kinds of empathetic experience; it would have been easy for me to read this and "get the gist" without feeling anything like the blow to the gut that I felt this time. But clearly the blow to the gut is the author's intention, be...more
