Relaunch

I lost my thread and got lost in a sea of literature. Time to start again. I am currently reading Great House by Nicole Krauss, so perhaps i will start there when i have finished, by I also want to come back to 1984, along with Ayn Rand's Anthem and Huxley's Brave New World, so I've got a bit of catching up to do.

Meanwhile, i was really struck by the last paragraphs of Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet On The Western Front' (Random House - Vintage (2005 (1994 [1929])):

"I am very calm. let the months come, and the years, they'll take nothing more from me, they can take nothing more from me. I am so alone and so devoid of any hope that I can confront them without fear. Life, which carried me through these years, is still there in my hands and in my eyes. Whether or not I have mastered it, I do not know. but as long as life is there it will make it's own way, whether my conscious self likes it or not."

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He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army despatches restricted themselves to the single sentence: that there was nothing new to report on the western front.
He had sunk forwards and was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over, you could see that he could not have suffered long - his face wore an expression that was so composed that it looked as if he were almost happy that it had turned out that way."


This passage is all the more chilling for the fact that the whole novel has been narrated by the protaganist, and it is not difficult to distrust the conclusions drawn by the second narrator in the final paragraph. It is impossible to forget the earlier account of the impossibility of finding men who had fallen face down, since their comrades could not locate the source of the sounds they made, meaning they might lie moaning for days, heard but not found by their friends. In addition, after hope had seeped away throughout the novel, it returns to some extent in the penultimate paragraph.

The last page of this novel elevated it, in my mind, from a very good novel to an extraordinary one.