Customer Reviews

After the War

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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This is one of the finest books I have read in some time. The book traces the life of Paul Alexander, a Greek by birth who fought as a member of the Belgian army during World War I. Wounded during the war, he comes to America and obtains employment as a chemist for a railroad car manufacturer in the small town of Bourbonville, Tennessee. In Bourbonville, he progresses from being the town curiousity to being a friend, father, business leader and farmer as he mentally recovers from his shattering war experiences. Instead of telling the story in a strictly linear fashion, Marius flips effortlessly back and forth from Paul's days as a university student in Belgium and his post-war life in Bourbonville. Marius is subtle enough to tell the reader just enough background to explain Paul's actions and emotions. We learn of Paul's complex family history, his friendships with Guy and Bernal, two university students, and of his first love, an older woman employed as a dressmaker. What we are not told much of are the horrors of his wartime experience, other than that he watched all his university friends die one by one in combat, and that he himself was badly wounded at Antwerp. Much of the book is a description of how he comes to terms with his wartime experiences, having watched the disintegration of all that was familiar to him. When we first meet Paul, he dwells in the past because he cannot conceive of a future. The ghosts of Guy and Bernal follow him in his post war experiences, both comforting him and haunting him at times. In the end, when he has internally resolved the conflicts of his early family troubles and his wartime memories, and truly comes to appreciate his life in the present tense, Guy and Bernal bid him farewell. The astonishing thing about this book his how well it ties together the threads of many different plot lines and themes. This book is as much about life in the South at the beginning of the century as it is about the ravages of war. The themes of racial tension, religion, xenophobia, intolerance in its many forms and the effect of industrial development in the South are all explored and weaved together seamlessly. The characters are beautifully developed and their stories told with a true Southern flourish. This is a moving and powerful book.

Sensitively portraying the aftereffects of World War I on the people of Bourbonville, Tennessee, this robust, dramatic novel is a triumphant celebration of the power of writing to create whole worlds and then lead the reader in exploring them. Spanning the years from 1890 - 1930, the novel moves back and forth in time, leisurely building detail upon detail until an entire community, several generations of its important families, its important businesses, and its religious and social organizations spring to life, tied together, as small communities often are, by custom, gossip, and a shared past, not all of it pretty. As the war wreaks its changes on the fabric of society, the author explores life's big themes--what makes life meaningful, how we connect with each other, how we deal with death of loved ones, and how we face the future--adding an extra dimension through the symbolism of Greek legends, especially that of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun.

Main character Paul Alexander (formerly Kephalopoulos), a Greek by birth and Belgian by education and social preference, arrives in Bourbonville, not fully recovered from a head wound received during the early days of the war. Through Paul, an outsider who speaks to the ghosts of his two best friends, the reader comes to know a variety of local characters--a grassroots industrialist who runs the car works foundry for the local railroad, a leading family whose members realize that their agrarian way of life is ending, a delightful moonshiner, the last of the family doctors who were truly part of the family, a brilliant black man whose technical achievements as a member of the French armed forces gave him a taste of life denied him in postwar Tennessee, and various members of Paul's own family back in Greece.

Weaving together such diverse topics as the Spanish American War and the battle for Cuba, the early anti-war movement, the growth of railroads and industry, the early women's movement, the Ku Klux Klan (easily the most dramatic part of the book), strikes and the labor movement, Bolshevism, evangelical frenzy, and the interest in foreign travel, the novel is an expansive treatment of some of the early influences on 20th century thinking, and, as such, is fascinating. Its comprehensive thematic development is equally striking. It is somewhat less successful in its characterizations, which are not always consistent, and in its melodrama, which while emotionally seductive, tend to divide the book into separate and somewhat disconnected units. Still, for those who enjoy big books which offer a treatment of equally big ideas, this is a captivating novel, great fun to read. Mary Whipple

I decided to pull this book off the shelf and re-read it after 10+ years. After the War is a sprawling narrative covering many years with a multitude of interesting characters and poignant tales. The book takes place in post-World War I Tennessee and captures all the idiosyncrasies and growing pains of both the country and its characters during that time.

The narrator, Paul Alexander, is a Greek immigrant who was raised in Belgium, served in the trenches of the Great War, was wounded and lost two very dear friends. His perspective, observations and journey through life are what drive this book as Paul is many things - sympathetic, frustrating, stubborn, disarming, naïve - as his life unfolds in this narrative.

This is a big, dense, magnificent novel and if you can find the time, is well worth the read - as are all of Marius' books.

This being the third Marius' novel I have read, I anticipated the superb writing and the continuous reminder that all events, past and present, those deep emotional sequences that alter the internal psyche, ultimately help shape future responses to external stimuli. Paul Alexander, Greek by ancestry, comes to America after family strife and being wounded in World War I. His past continues to haunt him in the form of his heritage and the loss of two friends during the war. Yet his own gifts catapult him to become the owner/manager of a large company in a small town in Tennessee.

The events of Paul's life are well-chronicled in a seamless juxtaposition of the past and present. This style allows the reader to understand Paul's reactions and to champion Paul's own causes, his perceptions, and his intelligence. We cheer for Paul while recognizing his flaws and the driving forces that seem to motivate him, those hidden furies that propel the human spirit into action. The dramatic events of the complex story include racism, insanity, love, friendship, betrayal, business, violence, and religious overtones. One stunning scene in which Paul's involvement with an African-American results in murder, extreme prejudice, horrific detail, and tremendous fear serves as a reminder of the violence that bigotry can create.

The many warm and redeeming characters affecting Paul's life are balanced by sordid personalities and dark experiences that threaten to overwhelm the story, sending it into a region of evil of which there is no return. Yet, the remarkable integrity and human responsibility of Paul Alexander continually lifts the darkness back into light. Told in a mixture of metaphors and projections, Paul's odd desire to return home and the challenges of the company he ends up owning and running almost mirror the complexities and confusions of the people. It all forms a wonderful reading experience that is deep, enriching, and satisfying on many levels.

On the critical side, some of the people are not well-developed, rather inconsistent, and we only learn about them through their reactions to various events. For example, Paul's wife is a creative, energetic journalist who is overly tied to her mother, to the extremes of religion, and to a past that almost renders her incapable of enjoyment. Some of Paul's friends lack depth of thought, and Paul himself, while brilliant and competent, is often portrayed as being indecisive. Perhaps the biggest criticism of all is the author's obvious atheistic agenda and ubiquitous disparagement of faith and religion. It almost detracts from the powerful story and the excellent writing style.

The energy of the book reaches a high point approximately 2/3 through and then fizzles somewhat in the last third, becoming more than a little predictable and slightly uninteresting. Yet, nothing can change the elegant writing, the gripping story, and the dramatic events that remind us of the fears, sorrows, and joys of a life worth living to its fullest. Highly recommended reading, After the War is a complex, heady book not easy to forget.

A wonderful read from a man who taught expository writing at Harvard, After the War is one of those special books you settle into and enjoy -- like wearing a comfortable old sweater on a chilly day. I discovered After the War about 12 years ago, read it a couple times, and loaned my only copy. It never returned. I missed it.

Knowing my proclivity for loaning favorites - there are some books I must have bought 6 times and still do not possess - this time I bought 2 copies. One is already on loan. Hope to keep at least one for a while.

This is a serious book, and well written, yet it fails to move me. It lacks an intelligence that cares about what is going on, if not the narrator, then the narrator's creator. Marius's narrator is such a dull, immature, self-centered character that it is difficult to get interested in what happens to him. He doesn't care. He doesn't care about what happens in his own life. He doesn't care about his mother and sister in Greece. He just wants to sit in his little room daydreaming about his college chums.

At one point, the older version of Paul reflects, "I am angry at the stupid innocence of the young man I was then, which makes me in this later time want to slap him across the face and shout at him and tell him to grow up, to be different, to be somebody else." Indeed, but this doesn't happen until page 373. Throughout the entire first part of the book, Marius presents Paul's mumbling "I do not want to talk about it" stance as heroic. It is difficult to understand why everyone in this Tennessee town courts this silent foreigner. Paul will say ponderous things like, "After he [Bernal] died, I never did mathematics again." (Page 155) Well, why not? What has Bernal's death got to do with Paul doing mathematics? Are we supposed to think that Paul is sacrificing his supposedly great talent as some kind of offering to Bernal? Actually, the statement is not true. Paul goes to work as a chemist in which capacity he must use mathematics to some extent. Very few people continue to do theoretical math once they are out of college. It is just a silly adolescent sort of thing to say. But you do not get enough acknowledgement from Paul the elder, sitting at his kitchen table years later, that this is a very foolish young man.

On the other hand, Marius does present a very complex story coherently. I only question his narrative strategy. The narrator is such a stumbling block it is surprising that Marius didn't see the limitations of such a narrow approach to his subject. For instance, Marius intends to address the bigotry faced by immigrants to small American towns after the War. These Tennessee people hold themselves above the descendants of Virgil and Homer, and yet cannot even tell a Greek from a Belgian! That circumstance could have been used more effectively, however, if Paul were just a little more Greek. Why have him give up his bazooka? That was one of the few interesting things about him. Or, the fact that he has taken this rather menial job would mean more to the reader if, at the same time, he were thinking of problems in theoretical mathematics.

The parts of Marius's book that I enjoyed were those where Paul is confronting these odd Tennesseans and trying to figure out the rules of this particular game. If we had a Greek mathematician trying to fit into a small town in Tennessee at the turn of the century, that would have been an interesting book. I could not understand at all the fixation on Bernal and Guy. Maybe Marius intended these characters to be "symbols of the past" or something equally abstract and silly, but they just don't work. I think here the problem is that we know all too well these feelings of nostalgia for carefree days of drinking beer in the student union. To raise this banal itch to such level of personal agony seems a bit bathetic.