Archive for All Quiet on the Western Front

a journal of the plague, sword, and famine year [with avocados]

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 28, 2023 by xi'an

Read two books by Alix E. Harrow, A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended, which are modern takes on Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Rather hilarious for their tone and dry humour, if rather YAs… And Undercover, a novella by Tasmyn Muir. Rather well-build steampunk around a moving city and… zombies. Plus a new volume of Blake and Mortimer, a gift from my son, which is a come-back to more standard scenarios in the series, set in the 1950’s between Berlin and the USSR. Hence much enjoyable. Not at all like These Violent Delights, by Chloe Gong, which I could not complete reading. I bought this book last Fall in Brussels‘ English bookstore, in the horror section shelf!, attracted by the prospect of a gang war in 1926 Shanghai. But the story is terrible, the style appalling, and the characters laughable, the proclaimed connection with Romeo and Juliet making little sense…

Made heaps of guacamole from the 2kg of local avocados we brought back from Martinique. Still unclear about cooking with the accompanying fresh tamarind box. Ice cream, as the flavour on sale at the Fort-de-France airport?! If not tamarind, we had a great (or slow) time eating our way through Martinique, incl. the highly original Habitation Céron at the Northern tip of the island and its most unusual mix of flavours.

Watched The Pale Blue Eye, by Scott Cooper, which stemmed from the appealing concept of involving the then-West-Point-Cadet Edgar Allan Poe in a crime inquiry, but flopped rather miserably with unbearably slow dialogues, a ludicrous incursion of dark magic, and a terrible ending. And both Knives Out, Glass Onion (#2) being much better in my opinion. Craig’s acting is superb (with his Southern accent), the scenario twists most enjoyable, if far from realistic, and the satire of tech billionaires a balm. The earlier Knives Out is too cluedo-y, with the final twist revealed way too early, and too much sympathy for one character. (But having Jamie Lee Curtis acting as a redeeming feature!) I also finished All quiet on the Western Front, which somehow disappointed me, maybe because E.M. Remarque’s book is one of my favourites. And I could not entirely recover the friendship bond between the troopers that was central to the story, presumably due to lengthy gory scenes or the accumulation of woes in the final hours before Armistice. The last third of the film stalls, somehow bogged into the prospect of the coming disaster as the troopers are in the hellish landscape of the front lines. The heavily stressed opposition between the muck of the trenches and the refinery of the Compiègne wagons (despite the stale croissants!) was quite unecessary, as Remarque’s point was to stay away from the higher spheres (as opposed to his later books, like Drei Kameraden). [The Guardian of 13 Feb features a highly interesting interview of Lesley Paterson,  the Scott screenwriter of the film who not only spent 16 years making All Quiet &tc., but also financed it through triathlon winnings!]

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Fear [book review]

Posted in Books, pictures, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2015 by xi'an

Last time I was in Edinburgh for an ICMS conference, I bought this book, Fear by Gabriel Chevalier, from the nice nearby bookstore, out of a pile of novels about World War I. This was in 2014, “celebrating” the start of the “Great” War… Although 1914-1918 is a century ago, WWI was quite a presence during my childhood, from official ceremonies to history books, to neighbours and relatives who had fought in the war. Like my old neighbour who had been a sapper, fought at Chemin des Dames, and had some schnarpel left under his skin that he would keep till his death. And I somewhat picked this book by chance for its back-cover summary, its tale of plain honesty about the meaningless war in the French trenches, surviving as a “poilu” for the four years the bloody was lasted and facing fear and pitiful superiors by accepting death as a most likely outcome. I had not realised then that the book was actually written in French by a Frenchman and recently (most beautifully) translated into English! And that it was the same writer who had written the arch-famous Clochemerle novels.

“We all have a fund of luck (we like to believe) and if you draw on it for too long there will be nothing left. Of course there is no law to this and everything comes down to probabilities.”

I think it is actually better I did not realise this until late, because I did not particularly like Clochemerle when I read it (close to 40 years ago!), with its easy jokes and caricatures. This novel is just fabulous and I am surprised it is not more well-known in France. The reference novel for the “Grande Guerre” is usually quoted as being Wooden Crosses by Roland Dorgeles, even though it is much less critical of the establishment than the vitriolic Fear which often adopts anarchist tones to analyse this bloodbath from another era (?). Just as in Wooden Crosses and the fantastic Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the book insists on the intense camaraderie between base soldiers, against superiors and suicidal missions, but, as suggested by its title, it also digs very deeply in the psychology of the foot soldiers when faced with almost certain death. And acknowledges from the start the constant fear, which would make the book quite controversial when it got published in 1930. A truly remarkable book I wish I had read years ago, when my old neighbour was still alive. (The New York Times published a much more interesting review about a year ago.)

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