Not quite the equal of The Good Soldier Schweick but still a welcome contribution to the literature of the Great War and its...
A lost classic of anti-war literature is revived in a fresh, vigorous translation.
His name may sound, to the ears of English speakers, like some kin of schlemiel or even schmuck, but Emil Schulz’s nickname, given to him by a cop, means something along the lines of “shrimp, scamp, scallywag and lump—a muddled concoction of all of these.” He is all those things, and, conscripted into the WWI–era German army, he is now, at the age of 17, the administrator in charge of three occupied French villages. There, writes Grimm, Schlump dreams, daydreams, chases women, and generally tries to avoid anything involving work; he’s a sympathetic fellow but essentially lonely, “a solitary figure as he wandered through the snowy fields of France.” Things take a turn for the worse when the Americans join the war, and then Schlump is packed off to a diabolical front line, where he tastes war for real: in one nighttime scouting foray to capture some unsuspecting British soldier for information, a comrade of his fires a flare gun into a Tommy’s stomach, and all hell breaks loose: “The Tommy was yelling, the machine guns firing at full tilt, and Schlump gave a shrill, noisy laugh.” Sent behind the lines for convalescence, Schlump dreams and schemes his way into peacetime. Both comical and arch, the novel, writes German journalist Volker Weidermann in an afterword, might have made a dent, but Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front appeared at about the same time and was heralded as “the German anti-war novel par excellence,” pushing Grimm’s tale off the charts and into obscurity. The sad ending to Grimm’s own life marks a dark conclusion to his tale, which celebrates the resilience born of bucking the system, whether the military on one side or the griftier aspects of capitalism on the other.
Not quite the equal of The Good Soldier Schweick but still a welcome contribution to the literature of the Great War and its discontents.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68137-026-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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