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Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition

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Catch-22: Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury (Everyman's Library) Hardcover – October 17, 1995

by Joseph Heller (Author)

4.4 14,267 ratings

Book 1 of 2: Catch-22 Series

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Named one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

One of the funniest books ever written, Joseph Heller's masterpiece about a bomber squadron in the Second World War's Italian theater features a gallery of magnificently strange characters seething with comic energy. The malingering hero, Yossarian, is endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war, and his story is studded with incidents and devices (including the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade and the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule that gives the book its title) that propel the narrative in a headlong satiric rush. But the reason Catch-22's satire never weakens and its jokes never date stems not from the comedy itself but from the savage, unerring, Swiftian indignation out of which that comedy springs. This fractured anti-epic, with all its aggrieved humanity, has given us the most enduring image we have of modern warfare.

This hardcover Everyman's Library edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury, a chronology of the author's life and times, and a select bibliography. It is printed on acid-free paper, with sewn bindings, full-cloth covers, foil stamping, and a silk ribbon marker.

Book 1 of 2

Catch-22 Series
Print length

624 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Everyman's Library
Publication date

October 17, 1995
Dimensions

5.34 x 1.36 x 8.3 inches
ISBN-10

0679437223
ISBN-13

978-0679437222
Lexile measure

1140L
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“Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
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He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.
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The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.
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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Two modern giants (LJ 2/15/70 and LJ 11/1/61, respectively) join Knopf's venerable "Everyman's Library." If you've been searching for quality hardcovers of these two eternally popular titles, look no further.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“Vulgarly, savagely, bitterly funny . . . A dazzling performance.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES

“An extraordinary book . . . of enormous richness and art, of deep thought and brilliant writing.”
—THE SPECTATOR

“Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts, Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II.”
—THE NATION

“An original. There's no book like it anyone has read . . . Heller is carrying his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him.”
—Norman Mailer

“Explosive, subversive, brilliant . . . One of the most bitterly funny books in the language.”
—THE NEW REPUBLIC

About the Author

Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a bombardier in the Second World War and then attended New York University, Columbia, and Oxford University, the last on a Fulbright scholarship. He taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University, before returning to New York, where he began a successful career in the advertising departments of Time, Look, and McCall's magazines. It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961. His second novel, Something Happened, was published in 1974, Good As Gold in 1979 and Closing Time in 1994. He is also the author of the play We Bombed in New Haven. Joseph Heller died in 1999.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION by Malcolm Bradbury

'When people our age speak of the war it is not of Vietnam but of the one that broke out half a century ago and raged in almost all the world. It was raging more than two years before we even got into it.' So begins Joseph Heller's Closing Time (1994), his later life sequel to his first and still most famous novel, Catch-22, a remarkable story about a piece of that war that raged in almost all the world. Thirty-three years after it appeared, the later book starts by reintroducing us to a number of the characters who have survived the earlier novel, and who now live not just in a postwar but a post-Cold War America, where the triumph of capitalism is complete. This is a story of the struggle of their ageing, the later stirs of their sexuality, the waning of their energies, and the fading of their lives. It ends apocalyptically, but closes with a playing of Mahler's Fifth Symphony—'so sweetly mournful and Jewish,' thinks one of the characters, who admits that these days he much prefers the melancholic to the heroic. And Closing Time is in fact a quirky, bold, sometimes moving revisiting of the characters, and many of the events, of the book we today recognize as a twentieth-century classic. Catch-22 was the American book that—perhaps more than any other of its time—voiced the anxious, absurdist, outrageous reaction of a generation to a dark conflict that had taken American soldiers and airmen to Europe, and concluded not just in the defeat of totalitarianism, but in a victory on behalf of the world of our glossy, often alienating, post-modern affluence. And the book was not just a satire on war but a story of that age of burgeoning affluence and all it brought with it - the grim period of arctic hostilities called the Cold War, the affluent society, and finally the post-modern phase of confident, narcissistic, consumptionist late capitalism in which we, and Heller's elderly survivors of wartime, have ended up.

Catch-22 is, first of all, a war novel. And there is little doubt that the war novel, for obvious and tragic reasons, has itself ended up as one of the dominant and shaping literary forms of the troubled twentieth century. It has not only played its part in defining the historical story of the century, but has also shaped the techniques, the flavour, the artistic essence of the modern and modernist novel. In the years after the Great War of 1914-18, the entire sensibility of the horror that had happened seeped into the nature of fiction. This was hardly surprising, for the Great War was a cultural apocalypse. It upturned empires, overthrew entire ruling castes and classes, changed the nature of world hegemony, and had a massive impact on the entire nature of Western and world culture and history. It changed Europe from a bastion of Western civilization into a shattered and unstable modern battlefield, and handed on to unwilling Americans a sense of responsibility for the direction of history. It shattered settled notions of civilization and social order, old hopes for the advance of history, established faiths in humanism and heroism and sacrifice. It also helped create a revolution in artistic and literary forms. It is true that the real avant garde revolt of the modern had begun earlier in the century, in the period between the twentieth century's dawn, the beginning of the calendar of 'modern times', and the great European crisis of 1914. Thus the avant garde experiments of modern painting, writing, architecture and philosophy, and the powerful movements and campaigns that developed them (Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism and so on), mostly came before the war. They upset the classic orders of the arts, broke the frame ofrealism, rendered art neomechanical, fragmentary and abstract. But it took the war itself to ensure the inevitability of their revolt - to shatter traditional forms, enforce the sense of cultural destruction, change the narrative and tone of modern experience.

Hence the 1920s strike us now both as an era of postwar crisis and an era of artistic experiment, perhaps the most experimental decade the century has seen. And inevitably one of the essential forms of its expression was the war novel, the novel that either dealt with the facts of war directly or else with its profound consequences. From the wartime years themselves and through into the 1930s, a sequence of novels appeared which came fresh from the experience of the front and the battlefield, directly capturing the life of the troops in the trenches, on whatever side of the eternal mud or barbed wire they happened to be. There were works like Henri Barbusse's realistic and immediate Le Feu (1916), John Dos Passos' idealistic Three Soldiers (1921), Jaroslav Hasek's grotesque, dark-comic The Good Soldier Svejk (1921-3), Ford Madox Ford's massive four-volume epic of war and society, Parade's End (1924-8), Erich Maria Remarque's German epic of the trenches, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ernest Hemingway's very personal story of an American soldier and a separate peace in the Italian campaign, A Farewell to Arms (1929), Frederic Manning's vivid, disturbing tale of the experiences of an ordinary British soldier, The Middle Parts of Fortune, also called Her Privates We (1930). Such books did not simply recreate the horrific experiences of a war that had taken so many lives, and had so plainly failed to be the war to end wars, or create a world fit for heroes to live in. They also emphasized the revulsion, the futility, the failure, the folly; and often the enemy was to be found not only in the opposite trenches but also on one's own side. But no less important were the novels which, without representing the war directly, showed the profound changes in consciousness, mores and values it had generated. Nearly all the great modernist works showed the power of its effect. The delicate, decadent, belle epoque world of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is transformed by the conflict; the anxious sickness of bourgeois society in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain leads us onward down the mountain and into the European battlefield; the great envelope of consciousness in Virginia Woolf's fiction is repeatedly broken open by the shattering impact of war. It was not merely the experience of those who had served at the front, encountered violence, mechanical death and the pathetic weakness of the human body, or sensed the general futility, that shaped the climate of modern fiction. War had shattered older notions of art, of form and representation; it had transformed notions of reality, the rules of perception, the structures of artistic expression. It fragmented, hardened, modernized the voice of modern fiction, increased its sense of extremity, of irony, of tragedy, passing its critical lesson on into the history of modern fiction, and the whole literary and cultural tradition.

Strangely, when a quarter of a century further on a second war broke out in Europe, and then, when Americans and Japanese entered after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, became a Second World War, its impact was nowhere near as great. Rather it produced, especially in Europe, a weary sense of repetition and a feeling of grim inevitability, as if the Great War of 1914-18 had never really ceased. Yet its horrors were even greater, its impact on modern history even more massive. Once more the direction of the world was fundamentally reshaped, the nature of modern consciousness and conscience even more profoundly challenged. The horrific revelations that came at the war's end - the facts of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews perished in the German extermination camps; the hideous impact of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which in turn brought about the realization that a global nuclear holocaust was possible; the sheer scale of destruction in Europe, where endless images of human desolation came from the flattened cities, and where long lines of starving displaced persons and freed prisoners hopelessly wandered a ruined landscape - displayed a new crisis of history. Moreover, the crisis was not over and done with: for forty-five more years, the ruins, the hatreds, the global divisions left by the war were to shadow the uneasy peace that followed. Once again, the war produced war novels, some of them very striking and remarkable: Graham Greene's wartime The Ministry of Fear (1943) and Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy of the German occupation of France, Les Chemins de la Liberté (1945-9), John Horne Burns' The Gallery (1947) about the Italian campaign, and Norman Mailer's The .Naked and the Dead ( r 948), about the war in the Pacific, James Jones' From Here to Eternity (1951) and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (195l), Evelyn Waugh's story of one man's search for a just war, the Sword of Honour trilogy (l952-61 ), and Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy ( r 960- 65). Likewise the Cold War produced its Cold War novels, notably the works of John Le Carré and the fiction that leaked out of Eastern Europe.

But though, from their very different viewpoints, such books displayed the crisis of war—the impact of totalitarianism, the horrors of occupation or civilian bombing, the agonies of disappointed liberalism, the ferocity of the campaigns, the vulnerability of individuals, the cultural and moral destruction—they hardly had the same impact as their predecessors. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the modern war that began in 1914-18 seemed never really to have stopped, but simply plumbed new depths of barbarism. Possibly sensibilities were even jaded, for one modern war is grimly like another. There was also the fact that, in the age of totalitarianism before the conflict, many writers in Europe had been silenced or exiled, and some had fled Europe altogether for the United States. And this time the scale of occupation and the impact of great bombing raids had brought the war directly to civilian populations; so had the massive scale of war reporting (some of it by the survivors of previous conflicts, like Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos), and this extensive contemporary coverage, verbal and visual, had made the novelist's task in some ways superfluous. It was also argued that the sheer horror of what had happened, above all with the Holocaust, had made literary treatment impossible. 'No poetry after Auschwitz,' said Theodore Adorno, arguing that the enormity and grotesque horror of recent events had virtually blanked out all expression. And nothing seemed over and done with; as East and West jostled for power and position, and the Iron Curtain descended, the future seemed to hold out few prospects for real recovery.

As for the novels that did appear, they no longer seemed to possess the surprise, the mythic power or the aesthetic novelty of the fiction of the Twenties; their techniques were vivid, but rarely radical. Indeed the most powerful postwar writing came not so much from those who explored the war directly, but those who captured the mental and moral atmosphere of anxiety, extremity and anguish it had created right across the postwar nuclear age. Hence many of the essential works were books of survivor consciousness or of modern extremity: the Jewish-American fiction of writers like Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, or the minimalist fiction of Samuel Beckett, the plays of Ionesco and Pinter. It took some time for two books to appear that did capture not only the horrors of wartime but the climate of absurdity and estrangement that dominated the chilly peace. Each treated the war with a bitter and grotesque humour, a world of the darkest unreality. One of these books was Gunter Grass's grim, incredible comedy of Nazi Germany, absurdly seen from a child's point of view, The Tin Drum ( 1959). And the other was a remarkable dark-comic work from the other side of the Atlantic, meant, said its author, not just as a war novel but 'an encyclopedia of the current mental atmosphere'; this was Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Everyman's Library (October 17, 1995)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679437223
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679437222
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1140L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.34 x 1.36 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #519,019 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Joseph Heller

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Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a bombardier in the Second World War and then attended New York University and Columbia University and then Oxford, the last on a Fullbright scholarship. He then taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University, before returning to New York, where he began a successful career in the advertising departments of Time, Look and McCall's magazines. It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961. His second novel, Something Happened was published in 1974, Good As Gold in 1979 and Closing Time in 1994. He is also the author of the play We Bombed in New Haven.

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Customers find the humor hilarious, witty, and biting. They also describe the book as interesting, insightful, and compelling. Readers say it's well worth the money. However, some find the chapters too long and grueling. Opinions are mixed on the narrative quality, with some finding it powerful and great, while others say it's repetitive and episodic.

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245 customers mention "Humor"211 positive34 negative

Customers find the humor in the book hilarious, upsetting, poignant, and witty. They also describe the style as original and entertaining. Readers mention the book is one of relentless madness well told.

"...characters and situations in this sometimes disturbing, but whimsical story. The first is Lt. Milo Minderbinder, the mess hall officer...." Read more

"...The book is one of relentless madness well told." Read more

"...Although initially this style felt original and witty, at times it became stilted due to overuse...." Read more

"...stopped being a problem and at the end I really liked the book and made me laugh" Read more

127 customers mention "Thought provoking"96 positive31 negative

Customers find the book interesting, insightful, and compelling. They appreciate the great anecdotes and stories. Readers also mention the book is hilarious, exciting, entertaining, touching, and full of quirky, all-too-real characters.

"...precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn’t quite sure that he..." Read more

"...I told you that as preface to telling you this: Catch-22 is a funny (satirical and absurdist) novel in some little bits, but it's also a tedious and..." Read more

"...The book has multiple compelling passages about the dangers of bombing missions...." Read more

"Kind of hard to get into it, repetitive, confusing but after a while its stopped being a problem and at the end I really liked the book and made me..." Read more

35 customers mention "Value for money"29 positive6 negative

Customers find the book well worth the money and mention it has a good price. They also say it has a lot of symbolism.

"great price. great book." Read more

"...Worth picking up, and probably still deserves a place on a must read list." Read more

"...It was worth the journey. This is one book you should read." Read more

"...It's worth it, I promise. Those times when you're reading and think, there's no way out of this, is there? Well there is, so stick with it!..." Read more

117 customers mention "Narrative quality"65 positive52 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the narrative quality of the book. Some mention it's a powerful novel with the right balance of drama, realistic qualities, and depth of construct. However, others say it's repetitive and episodic. They also mention the story lacks a clear central plot and is disjointed.

"...However, Heller's superior characterization (the squadron commanding officer's name was Major Major Major Major) and ability to make the most..." Read more

"...novel in some little bits, but it's also a tedious and repetitive novel...." Read more

"...This books manages to break your heart, lift your spirits, and keep you in stitches, sometimes all of the above within two or three consecutive..." Read more

"...Although this structure gives a sense of monotony and choppiness to the chapters, Heller manages to hold the story coherent with the help of the..." Read more

103 customers mention "Writing style"42 positive61 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing style of the book. Some mention it's spectacularly written, amazing, and clever. Others say it's confusing, difficult to formulate a string of words, and too wordy in some parts.

"...(satirical and absurdist) novel in some little bits, but it's also a tedious and repetitive novel...." Read more

"...Well, let's start with the simple part. The book itself is well printed, with the 50th Anniversary edition boosting some additional material, which,..." Read more

"Kind of hard to get into it, repetitive, confusing but after a while its stopped being a problem and at the end I really liked the book and made me..." Read more

"...This is a pretty fantastic book, and it's incredibly well written." Read more

59 customers mention "Character development"36 positive23 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the character development in the book. Some mention the characters are brilliantly evoked and memorable. Others say most of them are infuriating and some situations are downright aggravating.

"...The characters were pretty well developed, and with all the description the reader knows about every freckle or wart on their faces...." Read more

"...There are also so many characters in the novel and few of them are clearly delineated so that when they speak with Catch-22 reasoning, they’re..." Read more

"...Jay O. Sanders who narrated the book does a wonderful job of giving each character a voice. Yossarian sounds just like Yossarian...." Read more

"Good but not great. A colorful cast of characters and a good cynical view of the military and war. Great anecdotes and stories...." Read more

29 customers mention "Description"10 positive19 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's description. Some mention it's a wonderful assemblage of wonderfully stereotyped military men and women in a wonderfully unique, anarchic structure. Others say the cover and description are misleading, unclear, and deceptive.

"...In completely wrong time sequences. His chapter heading were misleading making you to think you were learning about one person only to have the..." Read more

"...But as I continued, I realized how the silliness tied in so well with the darker aspects of the plot...." Read more

"...Extremely confusing. The cover and descriptions are very misleading as they indicate it’s the actual novel, the product description even states it’s..." Read more

"...Really each chapter was basically an overly detailed description of a character about whom I didn't care...." Read more

25 customers mention "Length"0 positive25 negative

Customers find the book lengthy, grueling, and tedious. They say it takes time to get into it and that the chapters are jumbled together.

"...It took too long for anything to actually happen in the story and began to try my patience reading it...." Read more

"...For me, it was a little long and the style in which it was written made it difficult to prepare for presentation, but I did it." Read more

"...I too found that this was not a fast read and it takes time to get into the book, but its worth it in the long run." Read more

"...This is a long book, so if you decide to be ambitious, be prepared." Read more

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Rick O

This uproarious satirical novel by Joseph Heller prompted me...

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2013

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This uproarious satirical novel by Joseph Heller prompted me to think of Robert Crichton's 'The Secret Of Santa Vittoria', another novel blending WWII and comedy. Published in 1961, 'Catch-22' was the forerunner of Richard Hooker's 1968 novel, 'Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors'. It's not about Army Doctor's in Korea, but about Army Air Force pilots and bombardiers during WWII stationed on the small island of Pianosa, west of Italy. In order to understand the insanity of this story, the reader has to comprehend what Catch-22 means. In chapter five, Doc Daneeka explains to Yossarian ( main character ) and Orr, his roommate, why he can't ground them due to insanity: "There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."That's some catch, that catch-22," he observed."It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed." This catch was why none of the bombing personnel were able to avoid flying mission after mission.

The main character is Captain Yossarian, a bombardier who is convinced he is going to die on a mission. In chapter two, he explains to fellow officer, Clevinger why: "They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly. "No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried. "Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked. "They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone." "And what difference does that make?" Yossarian's fear of dying on a bombing raid was enhanced by his group commander, Colonel Cathcart. His lack of compassion was buoyed by his desire to be a general and more importantly, to be featured in 'The Saturday Evening Post'! If the Air Force wanted 40 missions before you could go home, the Colonel wanted 45. Every time someone came close to obtaining the target number of missions for being sent home, Colonel Cathcart raised the required number again. The Colonel is only one of the complex characters in this novel.

I have many favorite characters and situations in this sometimes disturbing, but whimsical story. The first is Lt. Milo Minderbinder, the mess hall officer. From day one, he wheels and deals like no other war time entrepreneur. He gets away with his shenanigans by telling everyone that they have a share in his enterprises. In chapter 22, he explains his egg business: ..." I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don't make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share." He gets into so many businesses that he even deals with the Germans! In chapter 24, he takes a contract from the Germans to bomb his own base: "This time Milo had gone too far. Bombing his own men and planes was more than even the most phlegmatic observer could stomach, and it looked like the end for him...Milo was all washed up until he opened his books to the public and disclosed the tremendous profit he had made." Then he says in the same chapter: "I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. "As the Milo character gets deeper into the book, it only gets more humorous.

My second favorite is Major Major Major Major, the squadron commander, who looked like Henry Fonda! People who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was! In chapter nine, we learn: "With a little ingenuity and vision, he had made it all but impossible for anyone in the squadron to talk to him, which was just fine with everyone, he noticed, since no one wanted to talk to him anyway." In chapter ten, we find that: "Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office." But you can see him, if he is not in his office. If you try to barge into his tent, he goes out the window. I know it's confusing, but his first, middle and last name was Major, thus the four 'majors' when he got promoted to, you guessed it, Major.This book is a riot.

My third favorite is Major-------de Coverley, Major Major Major Major's executive officer. Throughout the novel he has a blank for his first name. His function is uncertain at best. He basically pitches horseshoes all day, kidnaps Italian workers, and rents apartments for his men to use on rest leave. As soon as he hears of a city that the U.S.Army has captured, he's on his way there, usually at the head of the procession in a Jeep. No one ( friend, or foe ) knows who he is! But the reader knows that he is there just to rent apartments for his men. His picture appears in many publications, as if he is is leading the conquering army. I'm telling you this book is a gas.

There are two subplots that are absolutely hysterical. The first involves the Chaplain's hostile assistant, Cpl. Whitcomb. The corporal comes up with the following generic condolence letter: "Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action."This one was sent to Doc Daneeka's wife, even though the Doc wasn't dead. Col. Cathcart feels this letter will prove his concern for his men and finally get him in The Saturday Evening Post. He promotes Whitcomb to sergeant! The second subplot revolves around our hero, Yossarian. After Yossarian tells Lt. Nately's whore that Nately was killed in action, She tries to kill Yossarian and she relentlessly pursues him chapter, after chapter. Nobody knows why she wants to slay him, but it is funny.

The reader will also meet: Chaplain Tappman, who is intimidated by everyone; Nurses Cramer and Duckett; Hungry Joe and his screaming nightmares; Chief White Halfoat, who knows he is going to die of pneumonia; Aarfy, the navigator; and Huple, the fifteen year old pilot, just to mention a few. How Joseph Heller kept track of all these characters is unbelievable.There is so much going on in this book that I had to take notes to remember who is who, and who did what.This is a great American classic and should be read by book lovers of all genres. The great American author Studs Terkel states in the `other voices' section of this book: "You will meet in this astonishing novel, certainly one of the most original in years, madmen of every rank: Major Major Major, on whose unwilling frame the gold leaf is pinned because of his unfortunate resemblance to Henry Fonda; Doc Daneeka, who is declared dead despite his high temperature; Hungry Joe and his fistfights with Huple's cat; ex-pfc Wintergreen, who has more power than almost anybody." Enough said?

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Sean Butler

Why Did I Wait So Long to Purchase This Book?

Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2024

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I believe this is a perfect book to read on a long airplane ride.

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BOB

The Existential Catch

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2019

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The breadth of the absurdity becomes apparent once you realize that the ‘catch’ of the title is the foundational principle upon which the existence of all participants in a war is based. Almost every choice is between two mutually exclusive, opposing alternatives. Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel was perfectly positioned in time. Written by a World War II veteran about WW II, yet informed by the mounting insanity of the Korean and Cold War 50’s, it was released at the beginning of the 1960’s and became a clarion call for all those who protested the insanity of yet another war in Vietnam. Its sentiments reverberated throughout the decade and acquired a universal relevance to life beyond its literary source.

The syndrome of ‘Catch-22’ existed before Heller’s novel, though maybe not to such an exaggerated extent. Heller gave it a name and a narrative to illustrate how it manifested and spread like a virus. The bombardier Yossarian tries to be sick to get out of flying more missions. Having “almost jaundice” is not sick enough. He tries to be crazy to get the doctor to restrict him from flying missions. He can’t get crazy enough. In fact, his expression of insanity brings him to collide with a definitive articulation of ‘Catch-22’:
“Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to: but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
Yossarian sees the perfection in such a clause:
“Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn’t quite sure that he saw it all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art.”

There are dozens of examples of how various characters embody ‘Catch-22’. Yossarian’s commanding officer Colonel Cathcart is driven by a vain desire to be the subject of a feature in the Saturday Evening Post, just like one of his rivals. He feels that if his regiment flies more missions than any other that’s a significant accomplishment worthy of a feature article. Therefore, once any of his soldiers are within sight of reaching the previous goal of 40 missions, say, he will raise the number of missions to 45. He keeps raising the number throughout the rest of the novel so that the end total is somewhere in the 80’s. Yossarian may not know the reason Cathcart keeps raising the number as we the readers do but he feels the immediate effect of such capriciousness.

The major named Major Major Major Major (his father’s bizarre sense of humor inspired him to give his son a first and middle name to match his surname) is mystified by his promotion as he has done absolutely nothing to merit it. He didn’t ask for more responsibility and he refuses to accept it. Therefore, he devises a modus operandi that is permeated with ‘Catch-22’:
“From now on,” he said, “I don’t want anyone to come in to see me while I’m here. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Towser. “Does that include me?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Will that be all?”
“Yes.”
“What shall I say to the people who do come to see you while you’re here”
“Tell them I’m in and ask them to wait.”
“Yes sir. For how long?”
“Until I’ve left.”
“And then what shall I do with them?”
“I don’t care.”
“May I send them in to see you after you’ve left?”
“Yes.”
“But you won’t be here then, will you?”
“No.”

One person who has used the climate of Catch-22 and seized the opportunity to use it to his advantage is Yossarian’s friend Milo Minderbinder. Milo is ostensibly the mess hall manager. However, he has used his mess hall title as a jumping off point to build a commercial empire. He has become the super profiteer, taking free enterprise to the soldiers, buying at a discount, selling at a profit, buying as part of a complex trade rendering an even greater profit, all in the name of the “syndicate”. Everyone wins because everyone owns a share. The fact that the syndicate’s shareholders include enemies as well as allies does not stop Milo from doing business with them in the least.

Yossarian and his friends usually go to Rome when they get any leave and visit the same brothel. Yossarian has become especially friendly with one whore, Luciana, and Nately has fallen in love with another and wants to marry her. Their pimp is a 107-year old Italian who sits in the middle of the floor and pontificates. When he says that America will lose the war, Nately takes issue and says America is the strongest nation on earth. The old man concedes that Italy is a weak country but contends that it will prevail:
“The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying any more. But American and German soldiers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am quite certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed…All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last?”

Nately says he talks like a madman:
“But I live like a sane one. I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top, and I am an anti-fascist now that he has been deposed. I was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the Germans I am fanatically pro-American. I can assure you, my outraged young friend”—the old man’s knowing, disdainful eyes shone even more effervescently as Nately’s stuttering dismay increased—“that you and your country will have no more loyal partisan in Italy than me—but only as long as you remain in Italy.”

Yossarian’s roommate, the aforementioned Orr, has a scheme that is only apparent near the novel’s end. Orr flies plenty of missions. However, most of them end with his plane going down in the ocean. Yossarian views Orr as a bad-luck charm and refuses to fly any more missions with him. The pattern goes, Orr flies, Orr’s plane goes down, Orr is rescued, Orr flies again. And repeat. Near the end of the novel, Orr has disappeared. His remains were never found. No trace of him was found. Later, it is discovered that he has made his way all the way to neutral Sweden, sanity and safety. His scheme was the cleverest of any of them and he inspires Yossarian, who is finally given terms under which he can go home. However, to do so he is presented with another untenable catch. He will be a decorated war hero and he must say only nice things about his commanders. Orr’s success, however, provides him with another option WITHOUT a Catch-22.

‘Catch-22’ is, without doubt, an important and influential novel. Heller articulates certain realities of war and being the pawn of military gamesmanship that many had felt before. I’m not sure that the scrambled time sequence really contributes to the impact of the brutal satire, although it does provide a narrative equivalent to the circular reasoning that forms the basis for most of the decision-making in the novel. There are also so many characters in the novel and few of them are clearly delineated so that when they speak with Catch-22 reasoning, they’re mouthpieces for Heller more so than characters with unique identities. Despite these shortcomings, ‘Catch-22’ caught the zeitgeist of its time and reflected it back to a receptive audience ready to not conform and not accept choices within which were somewhere buried a Catch-22.

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JP

Brilliant and with bite.

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2024

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A classic set during World War II and a great choice if you grok gallows humor in your horrors-of-war reading. Be prepared for hilarious yet nightmarish loops of bureaucratic nonsense that test man’s survival and will to do so. The book is one of relentless madness well told.

Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2024

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Great! thank you!

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Bob

Brilliant, marvellous, outstanding (Review of the 50th Anniversary Edition)

Reviewed in Canada on December 4, 2021

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October, 1961. Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s home-run record to start off the month; the Russians (who had constructed the Berlin Wall in August) gave it a big bang ending by exploding a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb and; for me personally, a couple of highlights were that between those events I turned 17, lost my virginity (best birthday present ever!), and I – for the grand sum of 10-dollars – bought my first car (a 1938 Dodge Brothers sedan). All that, of course, an unnecessary preamble to what was the truly celebratory occurrence of that month: The publication of Joseph Heller’s remarkable literary achievement, Catch-22!

Now this is a novel that my 17-year-old self would not, I honestly suspect, have been at all interested in, but fully 60 years later I can find neither reason nor rationale why it took me so long to discover this wonderful, funny (yet at times almost heartbreaking) story. It is a tale of the dying days – dying is an important word here – of WWll and a cadre of characters that struggle in many different ways to hang-on, survive (and in some cases succeed) in what was assuredly an inconvenient and almost certainly an uncompromising environment.

A lot of other reviewers will undoubtedly try to paint portraits of characters - the likes of Yossarian, Minderbinder, the twin Colonels Cathcart and Korn, and the rest, and I’ll gladly leave that to them, but I believe you deserve the honour, the privilege, of meeting and knowing them on your own. I will say this: Heller spent seven painstaking years to bring this extraordinary novel to fruition, and his efforts paid off brilliantly. If you’re like me, you will wrap this story around you like a warm blanket on a cold night and experience side-splitting laughter in one breath before being plunged into almost inconsolable sadness the next.

And this book deserves to be read cover-to-cover, book ended as it is by Christopher Buckley’s telling Introduction, and “The Story Of Catch-22” plus a collection of nine terrific essay/reviews.
Read it all. Revel in Heller’s masterful storytelling. I’m certain you’ll love this outstanding work of fiction (that maybe isn’t all that fictitious!)

pb-europe

Aktueller denn je

Reviewed in Germany on October 13, 2024

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Leider erweisen sich Schutzsysteme auch heute noch als Fallen

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No pads 😢

Good quality

Reviewed in Saudi Arabia on July 27, 2024

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Good quality

Paul W.

low quality paper and bleeding ink

Reviewed in the Netherlands on June 25, 2023

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More about the book itself than the story - the quality of the paper is low and the ink bleeds so the words aren't sharp. Buying this paperback is an advert for switching to an ereader.

Rafael

Incredible book

Reviewed in Mexico on January 4, 2021

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Not really impressed with the cover paper material but the book is really good.

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Catch-22: Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury (Everyman's Library) Hardcover – October 17, 1995

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Catch-22: Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury (Everyman's Library) Hardcover – October 17, 1995

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Good book. Printing off on numerous pages.

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