Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66415 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-31
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 139 pages

Synopsis
Drawing upon his experiences in the Irish Guards, this is Liam O'Flaherty's novel about trench warfare in World War I.

Customer Reviews

Terrible Beauty
I have studied WWI fiction and nonfiction for a long time. I have read all the classics, both in English and in other languages: Sassoon, Juenger, Lussu, Blunden, Hemingway, Graves, Dorgeles, Manning, etc. I discovered this book casually, just because it was in an exhibition at the Trinity College Library in Dublin. Well, it's simply the best. Powerful, bleak, a real nightmare which however manages to tell it all. It's a stunning book, written with a masterful style, a book that does not hide anything, written with an impressive lack of moralistic restraint, where fear, meanness, horror, madness are described the way they are. O'Flaherty is so sensitive to all the psychological nuances (he was shell-shocked like the protagonist) that he gets closer to later, disinhibited war narratives of W.W.II such as Heller's Catch-22 and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, or to Vietnam war narratives. All in all, I think it's the most impressive account of what war on the Western Front was, and an amazing literary achievement. It's a pity it is so neglected, but no wonder: this is a honestly, declaredly, unashamedly anti-war book, and it shows war for the horrible and revolting and disgraced thing it really is.