Book Review: All Quiet on the Western Front

I've decided to first add some content to this blog before continuing with the layout. This means taking some old reviews out of the drawers and dusting and polishing them a bit for this site. There will be reviews of classics, though I don't think I'm going to do them in this format. I'll play around with a more consistent one later.

Fiction: All Quiet on the Western Front
Book by: Erich Maria Remarque

Genres: Historical, War

Rating: 3.5/5

In a little dark corner of the library, wedged between imposing hard-covers, sits a book that holds unimaginable power. This slight, flimsy novel is called All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarque and published in 1929. Looking at those four tiny numbers, you might wonder if it’s another old, grotesque narrative with moth-bitten English that you’ll find feeding the dust bunnies underneath your bed in a week. Well, far from it.

It is a book that presents World War One through the eyes and mind of one German schoolboy-turned soldier, Paul Baumer. Refreshingly, it’s different from the victorious perspective that we are usually associated with. The German boy, fresh out of high school, is swept up by the war and thrown into front-line trenches along with others from his class. It is through his eyes that we see Germany ripped apart; his hometown, family and friends taken away from him one by one.

There are funny parts and sad ones, describing every aspect the war and excluding nothing that pertained to his experiences and feelings. Through Baumer’s entertaining stories, we are able to understand that the war was everything to him and his generation. Before the war, he had neither a job nor a family of his own. During the war, all he knew was to kill and the terror of being killed. To him and others his age, the opportunity of life afterwards was bleak. The war took everything from him, and yet without it, he would have nothing.

“This book shows us very clearly that war is something else: war is not about heroism, but about terror, either waiting for death, or trying desperately to avoid it, even if it means killing a complete stranger to do so, about losing all human dignity and values, about becoming an automaton; it is not about falling bravely and nobly for one’s country, but about soiling oneself in terror under heavy shellfire, about losing a leg, crawling blinded in no man’s land, or being wounded in every conceivable part of the body.”

This novel does not spin or weave or tell its story to the reader. It shares the horrors and delights of something that took the lives of millions and made others that much richer. We laugh with Baumer as he skirts an exploding shell unscathed while carrying a stack of hot potato pancakes. We cry with him when he sits peacefully by a dying comrade, waiting for him to die so he can get the leather boots. All Quiet on the Western Front does not try to persuade or change the views of its reader. It only shows what happened to one particular soldier in World War One, with his happiness and grief, his insecurities and dreams.

- Annie