A Soldier of the Great War

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Summary: A Work of Literary Art
Review: This book came highly recommended to me and I was not disappointed. It is difficult to define what makes books such as this great, but for me it was Mark Helprin's brilliant portrayal of the things that make us all human; our struggles to make sense of a senseless world, the conflict of morality with practicality, our emotional and sometimes physical battles with mortality, our quest for peace and our longing for love. There is a lot of the author in this book which gives substance to the eloquent writing, and his use of the First World War provides a great framework for his story.

That said, I do have two criticisms of the book: the author gets a little long winded, which was not the sense I got from another similarly brilliant book, Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Often more is less. To me, the truly great books are believable, and I felt the author wandered across the line of plausibility on occasion.

"A Soldier of the Great War" is a deep, thoughtful, and moving book, and is a very enjoyable and memorable read. It will go on my "favorites" list.

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Summary: An absolutely incredible book
Review: Helprin is a genius of prose. This novel is an expansive tale that covers love (both romantic and filial), war, justice, death, the power of memories... in short, in this novel Helprin deals with the ingredients of life. He does so in a breathtakingly powerful way.

Quite simply, this is perhaps the best work of fiction I have ever read. I could not recommend it more strongly.

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Summary: I bet you can't put it down....
Review: Mark Helprin is a literary master and A Soldier of the Great War his finest effort. This lengthy tome requires sheer will power to set down once the first few pages are turned. Set in Italy during WWI, it tells a tale of a young man's remarkable experiences before, during, and after the war. This book is replete with Helprin's typically brilliant philosophical undercurrents and, if one can put the book down for a moment to fully digest what they've just read, it often leads the reader to ponder the bigger questions in life at an angle perhaps previously undiscovered. Read it. It is one of the best novels ever written.

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Summary: A War Tale Drenched in Italian Light
Review: This novel captivated me early and held on for the distance. It reminded me of Don Quixote -- outlandish adventure after adventure, vignette after vignette, enlivened by the character's enormous appetite for life. The main character, the soldier Alessandro, is so alive in dialogue and deed that deep into the novel I was a bit disappointed to find him devolving into a garden-variety superhero -- but after skimming through a few late stupendous feats, I found him returned to me late in the novel in his long riffs to his young roadside companion on love and loss, belief and beauty.

As a reader of several WWI memoirs, I was astounded by Helprin's detailed recreation of life on the Italian front (and on the hunt for deserters in Sicily). His command extends not only to the minutiae of combat but of life in Italy in the early 20th century as well as to the loving delineation of Rome and the Italian countryside. From page one, the book is drenched in Italian light. In fact, a potential criticism is that it almost portrays war in a way that recalls a delusive poem of the WWI soldier-poet Rupert Brooke, written before he had experienced combat: "into cleanness leaping." It would not be fair to say that all the clean mountain air and stupendous climbing feats sanitize the war narrative, but it wouldn't be exactly wrong either. The book certainly does not shrink from portraying the massive waste of life and tremendous suffering of the War, but it also suggests that the War provided an intensity of experience not attainable in peacetime -- else why would Helprin write it? He plainly sought the experience that would bring the sharpest edge to his hero's embrace of life and love. What's said of Alessandro's wife is also true not only of Alessandro but, imaginatively at least, of Helprin: "She wanted a man who had seen the bodies lined up in rows, the tatters, the endless columns of exhausted soldiers walking bitterly from place to place, the corpses sprawled over the wire. She would not know how to talk to a man who hadn't seen these things, as she had, much less lie with him in love."

Oddly, the book's emotional core is not really in the love of soldiers for each other -- though there are attempts to portray that -- nor in the love story, which is idealized and sketchy, if moving. The keystone is Alessandro's relationship with his father, a Geppetto-like Italian Papa with a stern edge but an unconditional love for his son. That love quite convincingly brings Alessandro to life as a character with the strength to endure all while treasuring tenderness. It's the images and memory of that love throughout the novel that make Alessandro such a moving witness to the massive waste and destruction wrought by the war.

In scope, ambition, and achievement, A Soldier of the Great War recalls War and Peace -- with a strong late 20th century whiff of Catch 22. Alessandro is like Heller's Yossarian in his response to the absurdity of the power structure that sends so many young men into the death mill, and the mad scribe Orfeo recalls Heller's Wintergreen with his mimeo machine. At the same time, Alessandro is plainly meant to have the greatness of soul of Tolstoy's heroes -- albeit all of them rolled into one, which is perhaps the book's weakness. But that one great soul does live on the page -- in fact, on all 800 of them.

Rating:
Summary: At 792 Pages, just a bit too long and overblown
Review: Many of the nail-biting scenes involving the book's protagonist, Alessandro, stretch the outer limits of credulity. And the book tends to drag on just a bit too long. Also, many of the best scenes end abruptly, failing to reach a satisfying emotional climax. Some great writing and compelling moments but, overall, somewhat disappointing.

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Summary: One of The Greatest Books About War
Review: Mark Helprin is a mediocre to poor writer who, in the case of A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR, has miraculously transcended his own meager talent and produced a moving, wrenching, romantic, inspired hymn to the folly of war. This book is to Helprin's other work as Messiah is to G.F. Handel's other compositions, although Handel was a much better composer than Helprin is a writer. It is hard to reconcile the Helprin who, in SOLDIER, wrote a magical description of vast flocks of sheep being driven by shepherds down the Corso and into the Piazza del Popolo in l910 and the Helprin who writes speeches for Pat Buchanan and the like.

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Summary: Stop reading this review and buy this book now....
Review: A book I return to over and over again for its sheer humanity and beauty. One of the great (and readible) books of the 20th Century!

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Summary: Why didn't this book win a literary prize?
Review: I was astounded at Mark Helprin's storytelling ability -- this was by far not only the most well researched fictional book I have ever read, but also one of the most engaging. I hope that Mr. Helprin writes more in the genre of historical fiction.

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Summary: Book Store Owner Highly Recomends...
Review: I was moved to tears, laughter, and out right admiration. throughout this book.. As a reader of many books, I was stunned to come across a book that took me away. After reading literally thousands of novels, and military books, the spark was gone, but Mark Helprin put it back.. This is a book that will take you and all your thoughs and pull them into the pages, it will make you forget about that denist appointment, and the kids baseball game. I was changed by the time it was over, and I have read it many times since, each time gathering some little nugget hidden in the pages.. I own two copies, one for me, and one for friends. .. It is a book about the human spirit, and about so much more.

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Summary: Is There A Tunnel At The End Of The Light?
Review: More than anything, the most attractive quality of Mark Helprin's writing is its brightness. Practically repudiating Joseph Conrad's famous dictum about surviving the "darkness" that hides within life itself, Helprin embues his books with a quality that is closer to cartoon animation than to real life--which isn't bad at all, especially when one comes to terms with the technique's ability to cast a skewed mirror image that both refracts and parallels images of a world overwhelmed by realism. But does this always work? Think of Helprin's style as a hybrid of that of Tom Robbins and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, two writers who transcend realism with a dose of the fantastic. If Marquez is especially notable for a gift of leavening tragedy and pain with the honey of humor and whimsy, Helprin is more closely allied with Robbins, an American writer who also skews his characters with a streak of cinematic animation but has not quite learned how to use this powerful tool to fully flesh-out important ideas and stances toward both character and circumstance. Cartoonishness certainly worked in "Winter's Tale," Helprin's most famous book, a fantastical tribute to New York City. But where the world of "Winter's Tale" was intended to be a reflection of the mythical qualities of a city larger than life, the world of "A Soldier of the Great War" demands a less superficial treatment, one that is, unfortunately, far larger (and far darker, too) than Helprin's style allows. While the novel is indeed entertaining, full of wisdom and Helprin's signature infatuation with the beauty that embraces everything, "A Soldier of the Great War" does not come close to conveying what was obviously immense suffering from the most sickeningly deadly war of the 20th Century. Indeed, what "A Soldier of the Great War" lacks is the obverse of Helprin's bright colors. Is this treatment of "The War of the Nations" a little too, well, Disneyesque?

Alessandro Giuliani (no relation to the current mayor of New York...)is a young Roman Italian who is often little more than a guest to many of the travails and cultural oddities that marked the earliest years of the last century. An embodiment of the rococo Romanticism that pervaded Mediterranean culture in the era, Alessandro's passion for emotion, verve for the irrational and energetic love of the immediate world of the senses provides him the key to survival, a peek into death and clues to the meaning of old age. At one point, in a suspiciously whimsical and altogether delightful scene, he even meets himself: An old man with a cane, passing by, greets him at a fountain.

While Helprin is lauded by many as a descendent of classic writers such as Stendhal and Tolstoy, the simple truth is that Helprin is too young-at-heart to be included in a club that often brooded over the meaning of suffering. Of course, it's entirely possible that the great critics of America, ground down as they often are by overly serious books on subjects far too miniscule to be taken seriously by a literary novelist, were simply flabbergasted by Helprin's jaunty style and blindingly colorful ability to make a sentence gallop and a scene writhe with sensation to note that Helprin never really addressed human suffering deeply enough to make it's saddening beauty come alive. This is a great read nevertheless, but whether or not it is a great literary achievement will more than likely become the verdict of the passing of time. In another age, perhaps, Helprin's hopeful, fantastic, and often absurdist vision may provide our inheritors with a glimpse of the American spirit on the cusp of the 21st Century. But viewed and mused over from the standpoint of a reader living so closely and intimately within the age in which Helprin writes, it becomes all too apparent all too quickly that Helprin's vision, at least in this novel, is simply not broad enough to be taken seriously enough to be suspected of greatness.