War/Military Novels

[Anonymat]

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a novel that deals with the absurdities of war and the military, similiar to Slaughterhouse Five or Catch 22. Failing that, I would love to get recommendations for any good war novel.

I should note that I've already read The Thin Red Line and All Quiet on the Western Front. Plus, I'm just about to begin The Naked and the Dead. On the science fiction side of the house, I've read The Forever War and Starship Troopers.

Thanks in advance.

[PeterL]

Any and all of the Flashman series by George McDonald Fraser

[johann cruyff]

Jaroslav Hašek - The Good Soldier Svejk

It's a satirical book,quite long(albeit not finished),but still very fun to read.

[Kafka's Crow]

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. I have a copy of The Good Soldier Svejk on my shelf waiting to be read.

[Anonymat]

Jaroslav Hašek - [I]The Good Soldier Svejk[/I

It's a satirical book,quite long(albeit not finished),but still very fun to read.

Great recommendations! I'll pick up Svejk as soon as I can find it. I can kill two birds with one stone, I can satisfy my interest in this genre and impress my Slovak girlfriend. She has recommending Czech and Slovak writers to me in the past, but I've never read anything she recommended or bought for me.

As for the Flashman novels, I think I need to read Tom Brown's Schooldays first. I'll certainly put that and the Flashman novels on my 'to read' list. Is there a particular Flashman novel that you would recommend over the others?

I'll put A Farewell to Arms on my list as well. It's a shame I've never read that.

[Oomoo]

Hey, guys, I am looking for a novel of biblical scope about whaling. I've already read Willie the Whale; what should I read next?

[Anonymat]

Hey, guys, I am looking for a novel of biblical scope about whaling. I've already read Willie the Whale; what should I read next?

Hazing the new guy, eh?

[curlyqlink]

Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy-- Men at Arms is the first volume. Unsurpassed WWII satire.

[Oomoo]

Hazing the new guy, eh?

No :) It's just odd that nobody mentioned War and Peace, because that's not just the ultimate war novel, but perhaps the ultimate novel, period.

I couldn't read more than a few pages of Slaughterhouse 5, because the prose is lazy and cliched, so I don't know what is meant by dealing with the absurdities of war. Tolstoy, even though he is a moralist, does not merely satirize the subject because criticism of human actions, no matter how profound, is not the task of the artist.

[papayahed]

Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield.

[Anonymat]

No :) It's just odd that nobody mentioned War and Peace, because that's not just the ultimate war novel, but perhaps the ultimate novel, period.

I couldn't read more than a few pages of Slaughterhouse 5, because the prose is lazy and cliched, so I don't know what is meant by dealing with the absurdities of war. Tolstoy, even though he is a moralist, does not merely satirize the subject because criticism of human actions, no matter how profound, is not the task of the artist.

I think satire is entirely appropriate when dealing with military matters. Anyone who has done military service can laugh about the absurdity of military culture. It seems like there is a black humor that pervades most armies. Catch 22 is a prime example. It had me, a veteran, in stitches from start to finish. Who cares if it is art?

I highly suggest finishing Slaughterhouse Five, you may be pleasantly surprised despite the cliches and bad prose. I rolled my eyes more than once at his style of writing, but overall, I thought it was an excellent novel.

Edit: If you don't like the prose of Slaughterhouse Five, maybe you should watch the film adaptation. I found the entire thing on youtube, here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE-l1moHiuM).

[mtpspur]

The Sand Pebbles by Mckenna (first name forgotten) but a very good Steve McQueen movie came out of it. Would recommend the movie Bridge Over the River Kwai but the novel suffers from lack of detail IMO by Pierre Boulle.

[sharpie]

The Things They Carried - Tim O'brien

[bazarov]

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. I have a copy of The Good Soldier Svejk on my shelf waiting to be read.

Hemingway sucks, Hašek is great.

War and Peace definitely; one of the best books ever written.

[Virgil]

Has anyone mentioned All Quiet On the Western Front?

Hemingway doesn't suck. ;) Though I do think a little over rated. And I'm not sure War and Peace is about the absurdity of war. I thought it was about defending one's nation against Napoleon's conquests.

[Anonymat]

Thanks so much for all the suggestions. They have all gone on my 'to read' list.

I picked up a copy of The Good Soldier Svejk. I was so excited to have found a very old Paul Selver translation for just $3 at a used book shop down the street from my apartment. This afternoon I started to read it and I can say for sure that this is exactly the type of book I had in mind. Every chapter begins with a wonderful cartoon of a scene from that chapter, like these:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tayl0010/svejk1.jpg http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/4/4c/200px-Svejk_04.png

I couldn't have been more excited until I read this on wikipedia:



The first two translations actually do very little for the book due probably to a variety of reasons. It can be safely said that after them the book still seems to remain largely untranslated. In the first translation, that of Paul Selver, whole passages are missing (ex. the famous passage on the Animal World Magazine) while everything else appears to be done in a very stifling and unimaginative academic style that goes quite contrary to the language used by Hasek. This probably accounts for the relative obscurity of this book in the West.

Succeeding translations are generally perceived as evolving from good to better.


I'm now thinking about shelling out more money for a better translation.

[superunknown]

I was going to say War and Peace as well. Although it's not satirical or humorous but pure realism. But I think one of the interesting things about War and Peace is that it was the first to really criticise the concept of glory in the battlefield. Tolstoy, having had first hand experience of battle in the Crimean War, describes a battle as it really is: extreme confusion and disorientation and lots of things happening at once which could affect the outcome in any number of ways. Strategy never goes as planned. There is no opportunity whatsoever for heroism in this context.

Although, while War and Peace is often described as an absolutely perfect novel, one thing that annoyed me was Tolstoy's relentless use of essays to drill the point of the whole novel into you. First off, this annoyed me because I didn't actually agree with him: while the "great men" view of history is admittedly severely flawed, to say that Napoleon had no influence whatsoever in the course of events is just ridiculous. I do think the point of human history being made up of the entirety of humanity is interesting in a deterministic sort of sense, but he takes it too far. I like to hear what you have to say and then make up my mind about it. I do not like to be bullied into an opinion, and the more you try and force your opinion on me the more I'm going to disagree with you. Secondly, he makes this point clear enough the first time he says it. Restating it a second time is acceptable, but there's no need to keep at it a third time, or indeed fourth, fifth, and however many times he comes back to it (which, as far as I recall, is many). This ends up detracting from the rest of the enthralling novel. I also find it interesting that Tolstoy says that it is in the lives of all of humanity that we find the meaning of human history and the novel goes on to examine various people to prove this point, but they are all members of the nobility: if you want to examine all of human history, shouldn't you be more concerned with the poor agrarian class, the vast majority in Russia at the time, rather than the very small minority of high society? Don't get me wrong, it's one of the best books I've read, but there's things about it that annoy me.

[bazarov]

In one sentence yes. But, when you read it, it's quite different.

I meant to say that Farewell to Arms sucks :)

[superunknown]

For Whom the Bell Tolls is much better.

I find that the romance is incredibly poorly developed in A Farewell to Arms. I mean, pretty much the second time they ever meet Katherine asks Henry something along the lines of "will you love me for ever?"

I mean, come on. Really? Maybe that's the way they did things back then, but seeing as how Hemingway's such a notorious cynical alcoholic womanising mysoginist, that seems unlikely.

[mortalterror]

I could not agree more with Superunknown. Those essays at the end really took me out of it, and Napoleon did have a very important role to play.

And I also agree with another fellow here who said that For Whom the Bell Tolls is a better read than A Farewell To Arms.

There are a lot of good war books out there, but what I think the original poster intended was war comedy, and for that all I know of is Slaughterhouse, 22, and Good Soldier.

[Sancho]

There’s no shortage of war books out there of that genre. Try these:

A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo (Vietnam)
Going After Caccioto, Tim O’Brien (Vietnam)
MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, Richard Hooker (Korea)
The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945, Paul Fussell (WWII)
Chickenhawk, Robert Mason (Vietnam)
The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, John Crawford (Iraq)

If you want to get at the true insanity of war try some histories:

The Histories, Herodotus (Peloponnesian War)
Face of Battle, John Keegan (Agincourt, Waterloo, the Somme)
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman (WWI)
The Longest Day,
A Bridge Too Far,
The Last Battle, Cornelius Ryan (WWII)
The Long Gray Line, Rick Atkinson (Vietnam)
We Were Soldiers…and young, Hal Moore (Vietnam)
Not a Good day to Die, Sean Naylor (Afghanistan)
Ambush Alley, Tim Pritchard (Iraq)

Just last month I bought a copy of Jaroslav Hasek’s Osudy Dobreho Vojaka Svejka at a bookstore in Prague. I’ll give it to my father to compliment the English translation of The Good Soldier Sveck that he gave me when I was young. The illustrations by Josefa Lady alone are worth the price of the book. It is a “must read.”

Farwell to Arms, does not suck. There is psychology in that novel Bazarov will never understand until he moves out his parent’s basement and kisses a girl.

[SirRaustusBear]

While it's not funny, The Red Badge of Courage was the first American novel to portray war in an unromantic fashion. It's a great book, tied with War and Peace for my favorite war novel (War and Peace is the better novel in general, but it is more about human relationships than a strict contemplation of war).

[bazarov]

Farwell to Arms, does not suck. There is psychology in that novel Bazarov will never understand until he moves out his parent’s basement and kisses a girl.

:( I have to congratulate you on respecting others opinion. Keep up!:thumbs_up

[*Classic*Charm*]

if you're interested in something a little bit less...conventional? you could try Famous Last Words by Timothy Findley. Not exactly a "war book", but interesting none the less