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A Cast of Notable Writers Escort You to the Hell of War, January 29, 2005
This review is from: The Vintage Book of War Fiction (Paperback)
"The Vintage Book of War Fiction" spans the twentieth century from WWI, The Russian Revolution, The Spanish Civil War, WWII, The Korean War, and The Vietnam War to The Gulf War. The editors, Sebastian Faulks, a journalist and author of Charlotte Gray, and Jorg Hensgen, have done an excellent job of picking a star-studded cast of writers to illuminate the topic of war-Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller are some of the forty writers. But beware, reading this collection is more gloomy and full of despair than the depression wing of a Seattle psychiatric ward during its rainy season.
Despite its title, The Vintage Book of War Fiction has numerous offerings from writers who have been on the frontlines. Perusing the biographical selection one notices that some of the writing is not fiction but instead autobiographical. Vonnegut wrote the classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five based on his experiences as a prisoner of war viewing the destruction of Dresden by the Allied forces.
The horrors, maladies, rapes, destruction, bizarre humor and so on of war are present here in vivid color. Hiroshima Joe by Martin Booth graphically transports us to Hiroshima right after the nuclear bomb dropped. "On the floor of the tram cabin was a partly congealed liquid slush of greyish-brown matter in which lay some broken branches, stripped bare of their bark. It was more than a minute before he realized that the floor-covering had been people, the branches nude bones."
These stories are compelling, but they are also repelling, grotesque. But one continues reading; we are pushed forward by the same impulse that strains our neck to see a recent car accident. Faulks says, "Has ever there been such century for killing as the one we have just endured?" The collection is splendid because it illustrates the sheer carnage and the psychological bruises in an honest, thought-provoking manner. John Horne Burns says, "Then humanity fell away from me like the rind of an orange, and I was something much more and much less than myself . . ."
Yes, you will feel the intensity of experiencing the war and its aftermath up-close as if watching an IMAX in one's mind thanks to the cornucopia of superb writers. But the good listener will also digest the excerpts as a cautionary tale and fervently understand that man must be peaceful to continue and prosper in our present nuclear age.
Bohdan Kot
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