Sniper

by Pavel Hak

“A terse and unflinchingly honest novel about war and man’s inhumanity to men and women . . . brutal, bestial and highly disturbing.”—William Boyd In an unnamed country, a group of fugitives flees their native village after an attack by the army. Their houses bombed and ransacked, their husbands, children, and parents killed, they are seeking sanctuary. Meanwhile, a sniper hides, picking off innocents in a besieged city. His apocalyptic, hallucinatory voice provides the novel with its main themes, the insanity of war and the terrifying exhilaration it excites in its perpetrators. Novelist and playwright Pavel Hak was born in Czechoslovakia in 1962. Exiled in France in 1986, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne University. Sniper is his first book to be published in English. He lives in Paris.

Genres: War, Czech Literature

112 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2002

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Should have been titled "atrocity". or " rape pillage and revenge with much musing". details the horrors heaped by human on (generally female) humans, yet is free of human characters. remarkably heavy handed.

I am intrigued by the attention that snipers get, that lonesome character, one on one, when in reality it's not really any different than murder by drone operators. Steven Hunter, I think, doesn't see this. To some degree Hak's book touches on the fact that the character of the sniper is loathsome, but his intellectual justifications are not presented very well. I find it interesting that Nicholai Lillin's book, Sniper, which was written by a sniper in the Second Chenyan War, has very little to go with killing from distance; it's because he's part of a unit where the sniper is the precisely thin edge of incoming mayhem.... also that book was actually written by a sniper. And it's more about war. This is not a war story, and yet I felt the need to refer back to Tim O'Brian, which in this review by Eliazath Schambelam of an entirely diffent book (Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam), the issue of moral instruction in the presentation of obscenity still perseveres:

"In a well-known passage from The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue. . . . You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” This formulation sums up what would appear to be the consensus view of the ethics of art and war, and it is intuitively convincing—except that it is a moral instruction. It tells us to look to war literature to school ourselves in the evil of war. A true war story is a good war story, because it’s horrible; innocent, because it’s corrupt. This ultimately redemptive view overlooks the fact that war stories tend to make war look rather alluring—if not because of obscenity and evil, then not despite these qualities, either. There’s no need to fetishize war’s gruesome pyrotechnics, as the Futurists did, to respond to the stupendous exigency of combat, which, when translated into narrative, becomes a near-sublime sense of stakes that implies its own, treacherous moral: War neutralizes banality. When Isaac Babel briskly commences a story with the line “All the hits had caught Trunov in the face; his cheeks were riddled with wounds, his tongue torn out,” repulsion is overridden by a dark frisson. It often seems that the more brilliant the writer (e.g., Babel, Michael Herr), the more pronounced this imbalance, no matter how ingenious the author may also be at exposing war’s hideousness and stupidity."

There is actually very little war in this book, it's all atrocity, and as a result it's a orgy of obscenity with a moral nightcap, skirting the line usually blurred by Hollywood of having and eating its rancid cakes of exploitation... And honestly, the rapes were WAY too graphic and specific to be expiated by the ridiculous coda that would be more appropriate to a Charlie's Angels remake.

[Gavin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think this is the worst book I've ever read. Houllebecq without dark insight, Noë without style, de Sade without wit, philosophy, or desire. It is not possible to blame the translation.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a rape fantasy book, it has nothing to do with sniping and there is minimal war content. The setting is a civil war, where the government is breaking down, the police and soldiers trying to fight an uprising. However the content is all about turning each page into a rape wonderlust. William Boyd describes this as "a terse and unflinchingly honest novel about war", this is not true, there is no honesty in this book. If you want to read a book about a sniper or war then read one of many true accounts by serving soldiers. Lady Death is a great book about sniping during WW2.

To give Hak some credit, the text follows a few different perspectives, there are refugees trying to make their way to the boarder with the risk of soldiers, mine-fields and poisoned wells. There is also the son who digs up his parents and brothers from a mass grave, the take their bodies for a proper burial, seems a bit unreal how he uses a wheelbarrow for all those corpses, but at least these sections are more credible.

However, we are mainly presented with rampant soldiers, killing and raping. They paint a hateful picture of the life of a soldier representing an oppressive regime, not one of them doubts the orders they are given to rape and torture, in fact they relish it, like they are out on a night out with their chums.

And this is the part which makes me most consider the reycling bin is the best place for this book. There is a commander who orders his men to rape and humiliate women, for the purpose of bringing them down, through venereal disease and suicidal tendencies. There is a rape fantasy section involving a penis and a rifle barrel to rape a female. These kinds of chapters come up a lot in this book, which is why I call it a rape fantasy novel, it's really a book for people who hate women and get sexually aroused by abuse.

Finally there is the sniper, he kills without a care, men, women and children, the more innocent the better. He has a psychopathic attitude, chosing his targets with zeal. He is driven singularly by a desire to kill and has no remorse or empathy, this sounds ideal for a sniper, but in truth snipers are chosen for their skill with the rifle and not for psychopathic tendencies. Pavlichenko, one of Russia's highest scoring snipers (309 confirmed kills) in WW2, felt empathy for those she killed. What irked me was that he comes up with a whole intellectual explanation for why he kills so many, this grandiosity is what you might expect of the psychopath, but it comes across as the drivel of an imbecile. Then there is a part where he gets anxious because he suddenly realises that he only has two bullets left and has two targets to kill, the highest priority target being a pregnant lady, which would most horrify the populace. But he figures that he needs three bullets because he always need a spare to kill himself in case of getting caught, however I don't see how he could effectively kill himself with a sniper rifle, he would likely have a side arm, which could be used for that, which would take a different caliber ammunition so make his fear about limited ammunition ridiculous. Also such anxiety would unlikely arise in a psychopath, they simply do not consider these things. Hak should have taken the time to consider this in character development, also he should have talked about sniper craft, ie using camoflage, estimating wind speeds rather than go through this nonsense about murdering babies in their wombs and glorifying the slaughter.

War is horrific and some of the things which happen in this book are not unlikely, but firstly it's too condensed, secondly it's nonsensical the way the characters go about their atrocities. Once you get over the shock value of the content the story is really bland.

[Olli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Karun inhorealistinen sodan kuvaus, julkaistu 2003. Tuli ikävästi Butsha mieleen.

[M M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Czech-born French writer Pavek Hak’s Sniper is a violent and awful description of war and the greatest crimes of all – those sanctioned by governments on their own hapless populations. This is a thin book, describing the points of view of three characters in a Balkan country: the sniper, an amoral stooge of the government who is convinced that he is serving the greater good by annihilating everyone who comes into the scopes of his rifle – children, mothers, old men and women, postmen – he kills them all indiscriminately; a young man who is determined to exhume and bury his parents with honour, fighting with every ounce of sinew the tough ice that covers them, reliving over and over again the brutal slaughter of his father, his mother and his little brothers; and a commandant who embodies the criminal decision of the oppressors to wage brutality in every possible way against the civilians, including degradation and rape and torture and bestiality. The three viewpoints are interlinked, with the horror escalating with every page. As anti-war novels go, this is right up there with the best.

[Kalyrohey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quelques très bons passages à la toute fin d'un livre que j'ai trouvé du reste très mal écrit et inutilement trash. C'est plat, bourré de clichés, avec des personnages vides qui n'inspirent aucune empathie.

[Tero · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sodanvastaisuutta inhorealismin kautta. Sekavan rakenteen takia kirja jää itseään toistavaksi sotarikosmässäilylistaksi. Rakkaidensa ruumiita kottikärryllä kuljettavan miehen tarina on osioista paras.