Product Description

Although celebrated by Hemingway in "A Farewell to Arms", the Italian front in the World War I has been relatively neglected in literature. And yet some of the fiercest fighting of the war took place in the Alps between the Italian army and the forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Over 500,000 Italians were killed or wounded in the war. "Sardinian Brigade" is a piece of war writing written with sparse simplicity. It recounts the daily life of the soldiers at the front, describes many noble characters, some crazy ones, like General Leone who marched up and down the trenches at night shouting: "Stay awake! Your General does not sleep!" The cumulative picture is: endless taking and losing of trenches; the deaths of comrades; his tragic visit to his parents who put on a brave face yet are terrified they will never see him alive again; and the Italian soldier who refuses to shoot an Austrian in his sights.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #560362 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 286 pages

Customer Reviews

One Of The Neglected W.W.I Masterpieces
"W.W.I novels" is a phrase that usually evokes Hemingway, Remarque, Graves, Blunden, Sassoon... but there are many other outstanding writers who fought in that catastrophic war and survived and came back to tell us. Emilio Lussu, an Italian anti-Fascist politician and essayist, does not belong to the group of the celebrated anti-war writers, but he should be put there with the classics. His ironic, destructured, sometime grotesque, sometime almost absurdist memoir-novel deserves to be included in the list of the Great W.W.I Books. The original title is "Un anno sull'altipiano" (A Year on the Asiago Plateau), and it refers to the time spent by the Sassari Brigade (the "Sardinian Brigade" of the English title) on the Asiago Plateau, where some of the fiercest clashes between Italians and Austro-Hungarians took place. The experience of mountain warfare with the legendary Sassari Brigade (a.k.a. The Red Devils, or "Dimonios") made Lussu understand the atrocity, the madness and the uselessness of war. And that is what the book is all about--which is a lot, in this our time.

Lussu's dry, corrosive prose is an uncanny harbinger of masterpieces to come, such as Heller's Catch-22 or O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. Luckily English-speaking readers can read it again. (The book has uninterruptedly been in print in Italy since the 1940s, but has for a long time been out of print in the Anglospeaking world: don't miss this opportunity to discover a lost treasure of war narrative!)

Sardinian Brigade: the First World War in the Alps
This entertaining novel about the Italian experience of World War I has only recently been translated into English and is therefore little known in this country. This is a shame since the novel is unusual, insightful and moving, and above all funny. Lussu's prose is clear and readable, and he reveals new and interesting aspects of the war which provide a valuable contrast to other better known war novels. I recommend it highly.

Painful but Gripping Read
The title is a poor translation of 'A Year on the Altiplano', which is really a description of what the book is about. It's one of those books that really gives you a feel of what it was like to be there, or as much as an armchair experience could ever do anyway. Futility, or course, for this was perhaps the most futile of WW1 adventures, and especially so for people from Sardinia, who were almost fighting for a foreign land. Emilio Lussu is thoughtful, and human, and at various different levels this is a book to read. It might be worth reading The White War by Mark Thompson first to get an idea of the context if you have never been up on some of those hills, and seen the war graves.