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Title: A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin ISBN: 0-15-183600-0 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 06 May, 1991 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.68 (118 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Lyrically funny
Comment: Mark Helprin is the most lyrical writer you will ever read.
Reading him is like reading a prose version of a great epic
poem such as the Odyssey. Writing pyrotechnics by itself
does not necessarily lead to a great, or even a good novel.
Luckily, Helprin backs up his style with substance--a wildly
imaginative, funny, and also deeply moving story. A Soldier
of the Great War is his best work, where he strikes a perfect
balance between the serious and the comic, between
fantastical events and grinding reality. The book takes the
form of an old man (the eponymous Soldier of the title)
recounting his life. Within this timeworn frame, Helprin
packs in comic flights of fantasy, dream-like interludes of
surpassing beauty, and of course WW I, which adds the
necessary weight of sorrow.
If you have been following recent politics, an additional
note is that Helprin wrote Bob Dole's farewell to the Senate
speech. However, Helprin's writing is not impaired despite
his apparently deeply conservative views; that is, he
doesn't use his novels as a podium upon which to declaim his
political ideology.
Rating: 5
Summary: read this book
Comment: Mark Helprin has a way of wrapping you in his prose. When reading this beautiful book I would briefly have that fleeting feeling that only a great book can give you. It is the feeling of floating on the words, dead to the world, dead even to your own limbs. That feeling of being removed from where you sit, or stand, and suddenly standing agape in the middle of a WWI Italian foxhole, or, more stunningly, somewhere in the Alps, climbing breathless peaks that have never been climbed before. A Soldier of the Great War is the kind of book that will pull you in so completely that you hope to never finish it.
This book will become your friend. The two Helprin books I've read have both featured enigmatic, nearly messianic leading men. Alessandro, the title character, is simultaneously brilliant, philosophic, violent, indolent, and hopelessly romantic. His story is unbearably sad at times, but also equal parts hilarious and touching. I can give you no higher recommendation. This book is absolutely wonderful.
Rating: 5
Summary: Helprin's richest work. Immerse yourself in its beauties.
Comment: Mark Helprin once offered this advice to an aspiring writer on how best to construct a work, to grab the attention of the reader (and here I can only paraphrase, as I have misplaced the source document): "Treat your story as if a stone thrown into a still pool, coming to rest at the bottom. Then dive in after it." The paraphrase is accurate enough for my purposes, and the message is clear: Know well the end of your journey before you begin it.
Little did I know then, when I had meandered across Helprin's advice, that it would be central to my ability to write my thoughts on "A Soldier of the Great War." For about the same length of time as that advice had been imprinted somewhere in my brain, I had also been faced with the daunting prospect of commenting on a thrice-read book, now bulging with scores of page markers as reminders to me of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even full pages, all worthy of comment. And, it seemed, the longer I put this task off, the more daunting it became.
Fortunately, this block was broken in the recent past, when I needed to give careful thought to a birthday gift for a friend. The gift couldn't appear to be too lavish, except in the riches of its contents. It needed to be something that would be new to this friend (and here I was at some risk), and at the same time something that would not soon - if ever - be forgotten. In the end, I decided to chance it with "A Soldier of the Great War," enclosing a brief note regarding what was in store. And the working through of that note was the curative that I needed for providing my comments on this Helprin work. So I threw my own stone into the pool and dove in after it.
"A Soldier of the Great War" flows over with great themes, the long arc of which is the relating of its protagonist's - Alessandro Giuliani's - life story, told in retrospect from Alessandro's memories of that life to a youth who accompanies him on a seemingly short journey from Rome to a near-distant village. And, following his own advice regarding the stone thrown in the pool, Helprin's lyrical, singing prose begins with the story's first paragraph, drawing the reader, too, to dive in, and doesn't let up until the very last page (where it then lingers for a very long while).
The overarching themes are classic: love and war; of love discovered, then lost, then found once again; of the blunt impersonality and the lunacy of war. They - and others - are all juxtaposed with typical Helpernian brilliance. There are maniacally funny set-pieces, interwoven so seamlessly into the narrative that one is not aware at first of Helprin's skill with the set-piece device as one is drawn in. (These include an excursion to the plains of Eastern Hungary that is one of the most remarkable of such pieces ever written.) There are passages of heartrending grief quite beyond one's ability to deal with them. And the story teems with characters both bigger than life and smaller and meaner than dirt.
But, at its core, "A Soldier of the Great War" is a story about love and beauty and the permutations one can make of those two words. And it is for this reason that I chose it. If you're like me, it will take you forever and a day to read it, as you find yourself re-reading - often several times, and on occasion out-loud just to hear what Helprin's words sound like - passage after passage after soaring passage.
This book is, also, everything that has already been written about it. Like Helprin's other major works, it has autobiographical content of both experience and opinion interspersed throughout. (One need not be aware of this before the fact; it is inessential to the story.) The story is indeed a classic Bildungsroman - a "novel of formation" that traces Alessandro Giuliani's growth in spirit over his life - and one of the very best of its genre. There is a certain convenience that, at least alphabetically, Helprin fits comfortably between Heller and Hemingway. But use this convenience wisely, as when browsing under "Helprin" in a bookstore: This story is every bit the equal of "Catch 22" in its often manic depiction of the lunacy of war, but is far more lyrical; a love song where Heller's work clearly is not. And, if "A Farewell to Arms" captured the Great War from Hemingway's uniquely American perspective, Helprin, by opting for an Italian protagonist, finds a universality that eludes Hemingway, and with prose that a century hence will continue to sing, unlike Hemingway's, which already seems stilted by comparison.
Finally, I am unsure as to whether I envy those who, like my friend, are experiencing this work for the first time (but I think that I do). Newcomers likely will be torn between lingering on each page and turning to the next, as the story races to its astonishing, yet in hindsight, perfectly-crafted and satisfying end: Helprin's stone indeed has landed in the deepest part of his pool. For re-readers like me, it matters not that one knows in advance how the story ends; there is a distinct pleasure to be derived from a lingering journey that is its own reward.
So, at long last, and not without solemnity, I can carefully remove those scores of page markers, needing them no longer. And thus I begin my fourth traversal of this work, this time with a sixth sense that a guiding force will keep my friend and me on the same page. While there are factors which make it an uncertain thing that we will read these pages aloud, perhaps in my meanderings I will find evidence elsewhere that this gift, like Helprin's stone, has come to rest at the right place.
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Title: Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin ISBN: 0156001942 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 10 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Memoir from Antproof Case by Mark Helprin ISBN: 0380727331 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 01 May, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Ellis Island and Other Stories by Mark Helprin ISBN: 0156283158 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 31 May, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Refiner's Fire by Mark Helprin ISBN: 0156762404 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 20 October, 1990 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: A Dove of the East and: Other Stories by Mark Helprin ISBN: 0156261405 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 20 October, 1990 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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