- TALES OF WAR AND LOSS
BY ERICH MARIA REMARQUE
The bodily, mental and spiritual rages of war told through eight personal stories
4.0 stars out of 5 stars
“All Quiet on the Western Front”, by Erich Maria Remarque, was published in 1928 and soon became an international best seller, having been translated into many languages. It was followed by a number of other novels. Among them “The Road Back”, “A Time to Love and a Time to Die”, “Heaven has no favorite”, “A Night in Lisbon”, “Shadows in Paradise”, all of which I had read and reviewed. His books are banned, and their author vilified in Nazi Germany, with his German citizenship revoked in 1939. Remarque first exiled to Switzerland. Just before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, came to the United States, living first in New York and then settled in Los Angeles. He became a US citizen in 1947.
While in the U.S., he wrote war related short stories. Seven of the stories in the “Eight Stories – tales of war and loss”, were first published in the magazine Collier and one in Redbook Magazine. Translators were not credited alongside Remarque’s byline, but several were identified in “A Note on the Text”.
As in most of his novels, the short stories told the damages wars inflicted on humanity, not only in the number of people killed, but also on bodily, mental and spiritual wounds. Each of the eight stories is related to a particular experience, ranging from shell shock, broken marriage, feelings invoked in revisiting old battlefields and finding the location where a comrade was killed, discovering that the enemy was just like them, and a young lady teacher defying the rules of the hospital attempting to help a dying soldier getting a glimpse of his youth before the war, during which he was teaching his class of students singing the song "I dreamt last night". The last two stories (entitled “The Enemy” and “I Dreamed Last Night”) were particularly poignant.
Bob Dylan, the American Singer who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2016, said in his Nobel Lecture that “All Quiet on the Western Front” described the horror of war so thoroughly and hauntingly that “I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did.” In the same vein, when I put down Remarque’s “Eight Stories – tales of war and loss”, I would not want to read another short story about war again.
Link to Amazon Review:
Top among 32 ratings, 4/6/2023
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