2024~12. A Soldier of the Great War

Mark Helprin. 1991.

I am at a complete loss as to why the universe would have this book and Creation "recommended" for me back-to-back.  They are very similar reads, although set in different time periods and with slightly different writing styles.  The pompous, intellectual superiority of the narrators could not have been more similar, though.  In this book, the overused storyline, wherein the crotchety old, unsympathetic man shows a moment of humanity and then we have to get his entire backstory to explain how is life unfolded in such a way as to explain why he is mean and grumpy, unfolds painfully slowly.  The problem here is that while many things go array in his life--really so many as to make me start to roll my eyes by chapter 25--throughout basically the entire story he always acted superior and above everyone else. Even when he was doing kind, self-sacrificing things, he was still doing them from this place of an intellectual analysis of what it means to do good and be righteous, not beause he actually felt anything like an emotional connection to the other people or the worlds around him.  He really only ever cares for a woman who is lover and for his child.  Every other relationship is held at bay. 

For example, he tried to sacrifice himself several time in order to save or benefit others, but these attempts are in vein.  As a result or this and other overdone plotlines, he ends up witnessing not only the standard "horrors of war" tropes that are a dime a dozen, but also ones that seem deliberately manifested by the author for shock value, such as when he comes into contact with the "giant" who who is into beastiality.  Please don't think that is what turned me off the book, though. I was turned off a good 15 chapters before that happened.

The narrator is a Professor of Aesthetics, as if there could be a more arrogant sounding title.  He prattles on about the beauty of art and the natural world, about the philosophical connection between art and science, and about such things as the "aesthetics of justice."  As he moves through one traumatic, awful event after another, his conviction that he is in some way the most important person in all of the narratives comes across in the way that I think only a Professor of Aesthetics could narrate.  That he was an expert at everything from mountain climbing to art to languages to love started to lose credulity.  His ability to survive physical and psychological ordeals pushed the bounds of willing suspension of disbelief a mile too far.  But even more than this, the part where we spend the better part of 500 pages (of the total 880 pages) believing him to be obsessed with the practical application of the philosophy of ethics to his privileged existence only to have him go off on a side quest to avenge the death of girl he was in love with in a war zone by a guy in the other military made absolutely no sense whatsoever.  And then, to have this venture thwarted by the arrival on scene of the target of his crusade's small child was just too trite.  More eye rolling from me.

If you enjoyed Creation, you will love this book--and the other way around.  If you are me, you will not have enjoyed either. At all.

On a side note, I was hanging out with a friend who has been recommending books to me for many years.  In return, I have recommended for him many books, which he has not only read, but almost universally loved.  I once went so far as to take him to the library to find the book I thought he needed to read right then, at that moment in his life. When the book was not on the shelf, I tracked down the librarian, who found a copy of it on a display of books people should read.  So, I have brought a lot of joy to this friend-reader's literary life.  And what did I find out about the recommendations this friend has been making?  Well, apparently, he was quite bent out of shape that his first few 50-Books-Recommended-By-50-Friends recommendation were trashed on this blog and therefore started recommending spite books for me to read.  Which, in retrospect explains a lot about the books he made me read (and subsequently trash on this blog).  Having had this conversation with him, in the context of having had not one, but two "friends" recommend back-to-back books filled with pretty much everything I hate makes me wonder how many of you are deliberately doing this to me?  Does this explain my high rate of Do Not Recommend?  Have I spent years thinking I am just a hater when actually this has been a deliberate strategy to punish me for some unknown, historical slight?  

Do not recommend.

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