Group Read, February 2017: All Quiet on the Western Front

Our group read for February 2017 is Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Please join the read and post any thoughts on this thread.

I'll be starting this soon, hopefully after the weekend. Anyone else planning to join in?

This is one of those books that I feel like I should have read by now, so I'm glad to finally be getting to it.

I read this just last year so I won't be reading it for this group read. However, I thought it was a tremendous book and gave it a rave review. I now have the sequel The Road Back on my TBR pile and I was considering reading it while the rest of you were reading All Quiet but I don't think I'll be able to manage it.

I startede the book yesterday and just finishen this morning. It's a brillant, horrible novels.
More comments when I have something other than my phone to write on.

I finished the book this morning also! Over Christmas I had read a long (factual) account of Australia's involvement on the Western Front so it was interesting to read a German perspective of the same experience. No surprises that the horrors were the same for both sides. Remarque's book is a very individual reaction to the war; the bigger picture/tactics are never really commented on and the emphasis is almost exclusively on the way this young man tried to cope with what he was experiencing, and his will to survive.

One thing that was striking about this experience was how young Baumer and his colleagues were. Recruited from school at 18 and those that survived to 19 were veterans training the next lot of school boys.

In many ways a familiar story, but one that needs to be read and thought about long in to the future. Lest We Forget.

A few more thoughts: I think there are lots of reasons why All Quiet on the Western Front has become the most notorious novel on the Great War. First of all it depicts the suffering of common soldiers in the trenches in Northern France where they are faced with the emptiness of the nationalistic rhetoric, which put them there in the first place, and especially with the horrors of modern warfare. Death has many faces in the trenches, mercifully striking some down immediately while others suffer for days or weeks before their lives are finally clamed. Death is everywhere, among the recruits especially but in the end seeking out even the savviest veteran.

It also touches of many of the common themes in other writings on the war, like the gulf between soldiers and civilians at home, the cameraderie with fellow soldiers, the bitterness directed at generals and politicians etc. All this themes are found in Under Fire by Henri Barbusse as well, but Remarque's novel is a much more complete work of art.

I really enjoyed it, probably because Paul and his friends remained human and recognizable, even in the face of incredible suffering.

>5 puckers: I agree, of course, that the broader view of the war is absent. I think Remarque is deliberately trying to stress the limited outlook of the individual soldier and the feeling of meaninglessness that is created by this very narrow understanding of the war.

Has anyone read the sequel The Road Back? I am curious if it's a true sequel or as good as the first.

>6 Henrik_Madsen: Agree with all those observations. From my memories of Under Fire (which I thought was also a great novel) this latter book had more a sense of the mass chaos and slaughter in the charges across No Mans Land. In contrast it was interesting to get the limited perspective of Paul from his bomb crater seeing the French run past him and then retreat back over him (with the memorable emotions he ran through in confronting the French soldier in his crater). As you say this adds to the meaninglessness of it all - you have no idea where on the front he is or the tactics behind his reconnaissance mission; he's just one young man trying to survive another day in hell.

>8 puckers: I enjoyed Under Fire as well, and though I think All Quiet on the Western Front is a better book overall, not much rivals the depiction of the charge in Under Fire. That is quite literally breathtaking.

I finished the book today. I thought it was a very effective look at what it was really like to be a soldier in WWI. I was also struck by the age of the narrator and how hard it was to go on leave and return home. As in many war books, the friendships forged on the front were central and moving.

It makes me so mad, though, that the generation that went through this was still alive for WWII and it happened anyway. I understand the academic reasons why this happened, but I still can't quite come to terms with it.

I've just read this, I've been bogged down in uninspiring books and this group read was a casualty. Still I'm all caught up now.

Wow. Just so intense. There wasn't much which focused on who the boys actually were, even the names were all over the place. They were just young men, the same as young men everywhere, and they were completely ruined by the trenches.

It was even worse because we know that in just a few short years it would happen all over again...

>11 M1nks: I agree that the boys were not really characterized individually, they seemed to all be "types" of people out there. That makes it even more impressive to me that Remarque was still able to portray the close friendships or maybe better put, that the shared experiences bound these men even if they didn't actually know each other that well.

Yes, the bond of brotherhood. I've just finished reading At Swim, Two Boys which talks about the same thing.

Like you I'm glad to have read this; I felt it was a hole in the standard 'reading cannon'. Apparently my library thought so too as it didn't have an ebook so I recommended it and it was bought the next day!