A Soldier Of The Great War (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
I finished this novel with a newborn baby (my own, if you’re wondering) on my chest. The book and the baby were (literally) roughly the same size, so turning the pages without waking the infant was a challenge. Also challenging was trying to read after having been awake for three straight days. The old saying is definitely true: it’s tough to read while suffering audible and visual hallucinations. (At one point, the heat duct in my room starting lecturing me on the European Monetary Union; that was when I knew I needed sleep bad). What was my point? I’ve totally forgotten, because my brain feels like I’ve just consumed three gallons of Nyquil and only two gallons of Red Bull. Oh, yeah. My point is that, on a normal day, in my old life, I’d have a hard time reviewing Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War. The mastery of its prose, the depths of its philosophy, and the confidence in its execution, is just that daunting. It’s even harder to review it now, with a baby on my lap and a milk-spit-stained t-shirt on my back. But I’ll try. To begin, A Soldier of the Great War is not your typical World War I novel. Forget Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Heck, forget the Western Front entirely. This is not a story of trenches and barbed wire. There are horses, but none of them are anthropomorphized. It does not feature Brits, Frenchmen, or Germans. To the contrary, the main character is – of all nationalities – an Italian named Alessandro Giuliani. (Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Italians are better known more for their calzones and hand-talking than their martial abilities. But I digress). The novel is structured as an extended flashback, framed with scenes featuring an elderly Alessandro. It begins in 1964, with Alessandro catching a streetcar to Monte Prato, 44 miles from Rome. He gets on the car, and is on his way, when he spots a young man on foot trying to keep up. Alessandro forces the driver to make an unexpected stop, and ends up outside with the young man, whose name is Nicolo. The two set out on foot. Alessandro, a professor of aesthetics, begins a dialogue with Nicolo, an illiterate factory worker. Creative writing teachers are always preaching a hook. You’ve got to hook the reader right away, and draw them into the book. You’ve got to call me Ishmael them, or all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way them. Helprin ignores this advice completely. In fact, he does the exact opposite, as the first 80 or so pages are barely more than a dialectic. Full disclosure: I’ve started and quit this book before, out of sheer boredom. But that was when I was younger, and all I cared about was getting to the battle scenes. I’m more mature now, so I also care about getting to the sex scenes (of which there are none, unfortunately). This time, I did not quit. This time I pushed onward. And I want to encourage you to do the same. Maybe you’ll even like these pages; it’s not as though they are poorly written, because they aren’t. I guess you can view this section as a more engaging version of Plato’s Five Dialogues. I for one, simply had no desire to return to my days in a freshman level philosophy class, trying to stay awake while a bumbling adjunct meditated on Descartes. Fortunately, the story eventually cuts away from Alessandro’s ad hoc roadside lecture series. The first flashback brings us back to a time when Alessandro is a young child, on a trip to the Alps with his father, an attorney. This brief, lyrical section demonstrates almost all the novel’s many virtues: an exquisite sense of place; an unabashed romanticism; a mordant wit; and amazingly memorable sequences, such as Alessandro’s midnight gondola ride down the mountainside, with a man dying of a heart attack. The next flashback moves the story forward in time. It shows us Alessandro as a young man, riding fast horses, climbing mountains with his friend Rafi, and wooing a young woman who lives near his father’s house. During this section, Helprin includes a long sequence in which Alessandro attends an ambassador’s ball, and later sneaks into a party at the French Embassy, where he stumbles upon a young girl named Arianne. She was the youngest, but she stood out among the other girls because of her beauty. When she was a child the physical characteristics that would later make her very beautiful were so striking that she seemed to have been almost homely. Only someone of long experience might have seen breathtaking beauty awkwardly sleeping in what appeared to have been catastrophically misaligned features – the broad expanses of her cheeks and her forehead, the independent energy of her eyes, the painfully beautiful arch of her brows, the smile that, even at a distance, even in memory, filled anyone who had seen it with love and paralyzing pleasure.These early flashbacks, which also includes a train ride to Munich where Alessandro gazes upon Raphael’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti, create an atmosphere of peacefulness, indolence and, most importantly, beauty. Aesthetics – the nature of beauty – is a recurring theme in A Soldier of the Great War. The ugliness of war is continually contrasted to the beauty of life. Sometimes (too often, in fact) Helprin does this explicitly, in Alessandro’s frequent monologues. Other times (and more powerfully), he accomplishes this task by mirror-twinning early scenes of peace (such as Alessandro and Rafi enjoying a prewar climb) with later scenes of battle (Alessandro fighting with the Alpini among his beloved mountains).These prewar scenes, set in the Alps, or in a lovingly reconstructed Rome (Helprin must have great affection for the city, since he seems to know its every back alley), proceed at a languid pace.Suddenly, and without much transition, Helprin jumps forward several years, to 1916, where Alessandro is already a member of the 19th River Guard, a group of naval men turned into infantry. This spatial leap, leaving Alessandro as a young civilian and rejoining him as a veteran soldier, is effectively jarring, mimicking as it does the confusion that must occur when moving from peacetime to war. From this point on, the story follows a more conventional timeline, remaining with Alessandro until the war ends (that is, with no more cutaways to old Alessandro). Alessandro’s experiences are not typical of the average “soldier of the Great War.” There is no trace of (for instance) All Quite on the Western Front, and its familiar antiwar framework of excited-young-man-going-to-war-and-losing-his-youth-to-the-madness. There are some scenes set in the trenches, with the ubiquitous mud, rats, and barbed wire. But the most familiar trait of World War I – its static, grinding nature – is nowhere in evidence in Helprin’s novel. Instead, Alessandro finds himself in an ever-shifting current, flowing from one adventure to the next. One moment he is with a special unit hunting deserters among the Mafioso in Sicily; the next moment he is a deserter himself, awaiting execution. He finds himself, at various points, quarrying marble for tombstones, serving with Italy’s elite mountain troops, riding with a troop of Bulgarian cavalry, and as a prisoner-of-war in a Hungarian palace. tMany of these scenes have the quality of a fable about them. They are real, yes, but also heightened somehow. It’s not magical-realism by any measure, but it’s not vérité either. The people Alessandro meets and talks to (with some exceptions) don’t feel like well-developed three-dimensional human beings, with their own back-stories; to the contrary, they come off as symbols, their mouths filled with dialogue that is meant to challenge Alessandro’s own beliefs or, more often, that serve as straw-ideas for Alessandro to bludgeon with his intellectual powers. One of the novel’s more irritating tics is Alessandro’s constant pontificating. No one is safe from his erudition, including his superior officers, his captors, and his fellow soldiers. Somehow, despite Alessandro’s insubordination, contentiousness, and lack of any knowledge of civil discourse, no one punches him in the mouth (or has him arrested, or shot, or at least gagged). Here, Alessandro: I’m a critic. I write essays about works of art. It’s like being a eunuch in the seraglio, but unrequited love is the sweetest, and I have the proper distance. I can compress the qualities of beauty I’ve been trained to see, store them up, and bring them out at will, rapid-fire, in the combinations I want. Images. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of images. My field was the aesthetics of painting. In homage to that, I keep the images compressed in tiny little squares, like the works of Oderisi da Gubbio or Franco Bolognese, like little postage stamps. Each one glows. It’s as if you were looking into a firebox through the peephole or peering into one of those Easter eggs with scenes painted within, or watching a brightly illuminated and distant part of a city through a telescope with sparkling optics…At times like these, Alessandro comes off as a douche-ier version of Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother. Often, I really wanted to punch him in the nuts. This is not a plot-oriented novel, in which all the narrative strands lead to a thundering climax (a great battle, a great kiss). Rather, the novel is a series of big set pieces stitched together with the aforementioned philosophical exposition. No sooner has Alessandro survived one encounter than he is on his way to the next. The risk with this kind of setup is that it creates a sensation of what could possibly happen next? that stretches credulity and believability. Moreover, by framing the novel with an elderly Alessandro, Helprin has assured you of one important thing: his main character survives. Thus, no matter what kind of fix Alessandro gets himself into, there is no dramatic tension. We know that Alessandro makes it into spry, wealthy, acid-tongued old age. Helprin overcomes this by making these set pieces absolutely amazing. It is at these times that the writing is at its most dazzling, creating images that last in your mind. Take, for instance, a sequence in which Alessandro, serving with the Alpini, is ordered to climb to a lookout post high in the mountains. From that vantage point, alone, he is supposed to keep an eye on the enemy. Helprin does a commendable job evoking the terror, the loneliness, and also the beauty of the assignment: It was remarkable to see the whole world, so wide and so blue, from one place. Straight on, the sky had as much depth and distance as above, and with the clouds below running to the horizon like a white floor, Alessandro believed that he was in the sky rather than under it. For that reason, though not for that reason alone, he felt nearly all the time something akin to the sensation of flying: not vertigo or a feeling of motion, but an aura of lightness, disconnectedness, and quiet. Glacier light arising from blue ice is blinding and cool. When it blends with the light of the sky it commands attention and awe, as if in it the real work of the world is accomplished, and the operations of the richer, warmer light below are of a lesser, fallen order. Because the story is told in the third-person limited, Alessandro appears on just about every page. (There are only two or three times that the book leaves his point-of-view. These cut-scenes, while a bit of a narrative cheat, are quite effective). This was a bit problematic for me, since Alessandro, though putatively the humanist hero, is also something of an arrogant blowhard. I don’t think a single person who falls into Alessandro’s ambit manages to escape without a lecture. Another result of the tight focus on Alessandro, aside from vague annoyance, is that secondary characters don’t make much of an impression. Certainly, we meet a lot of people. However, as I mentioned above, many of them serve only as intellectual foils for our protagonist. Dozens of others, such as the various soldiers in Alessandro’s company, are only dimly defined, and disappear too quickly to be memorable. Furthermore, the female characters suffer from a debilitating defect: they seem to exist only as obstacles for Alessandro to conquer. And by conquer, I mean penetrate Biblically. Even Luciana, Alessandro’s sister, serves this purpose, during a queasy mid-war interlude in which her attraction to her brother is strongly implied. (Not having sex with his sister is just one of the many things Alessandro is forced to overcome during the Great War). A Soldier of the Great War strives mightily to be about many things, love included. Unfortunately, most of Alessandro’s interactions with women boil down to him giving his pre-packaged speech about aesthetics, and then somehow getting into their pants (or the early-20th century variation thereof). The chief exception is Alessandro’s love affair with a nurse, which is supposed to be a dramatic centerpiece, but actually dwells in the land of been-there-done-that. (With the World War I backdrop, the Italian setting, and the soldier-nurse relationship, one is almost forced into comparisons to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. When brought into that relief, Alessandro’s affair seems even paltrier than before. You just can’t beat Catherine and Henry for aching love and kick-you-in-the-teeth tragedy).If there is an antagonist, that role belongs to Orfeo Quatta, who might be Helprin’s most ingenious creation. Orfeo is a mad dwarf who used to work as a scribe in the office of Alessandro’s father’s law office, before being replaced by the typewriter. During the war, Orfeo gets a job in the War Department, and spends his time changing orders and troop dispositions, according to his whim. In that way, Orfeo becomes the laughing, raving symbol of the lunacy of war. I thought there was a lot of unevenness in A Soldier of the Great War. It’s episodic in nature, and some episodes work better than others. And there was only so much of Alessandro I could take, before I started to wish him ill. That aside, Helprin’s enormous talent cannot be denied. He has created something that is overflowing with ideas, intelligence, humor, and lasting images. This is accessible – if sometimes pretentious – literary fiction, with prose worth remembering. It was enough to leave me – sleep-deprived, covered in baby puke, surrounded by diapers – a bit in awe. And more than a bit jealous of Helprin’s talent.
“A Soldier of the Great War” declared war against my abstract thinking and conscripted me into an infantry battalion that fights for the right of mystery and beauty to exist amidst uncertainty. Helprin enlists me to deliberate living and declares to me my duty to relish the little joys of life and to appreciate their specific peculiarity, rather than to speculate about grandiose and fantastical theories, which attempt to generalize and define the indefinable. The battle for soul requires a soldier’s courage, and the outcome is uncertain until we draw our final breath.Helprin dares me to leave the sterile classroom of theory and to get my fingernails dirty in the soil of life. He rebukes the organization of my life around pre-ordained and derivative notions of political and economic theory, which are as imperfect as medieval attempts to apply Aristotelian syllogisms to spiritual yearnings. Meanwhile, he reminds me that my intransigent unbelief is as illogical as my intransigent belief. He calls me to embrace suffering as a part of my identity and to see my scars (and those of others) as works of art. Alessandro Guiliani is an Italian professor of aesthetics (the study of beauty), and he witnesses a firestorm of connections between art, life, and the mysterious hope of his soul. A resident of Rome, Alessandro waxes lyrical about the sun, stars, clouds, light, and the colors that blind and clarify. Yet, Alessandro never teaches at university because the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand interrupts his reverie of beauty and punctures his illusory security. Alessandro loves horses, mountain climbing, and thunder, but he must leave behind the world of sedate beauty for the mud and shrapnel of World War I. As a soldier of the Italian line against the Austrians, he also fights to retain his color of humanity and purpose against the blackness of absurd and random slaughter. Yet Beauty never abandons Alessandro, and he, in turn, never abandons Beauty. Alessandro, instead, articulates the vision of a breed of people who are traumatized but not de-sensitized by grave injury and who refuse to linger in the cul-de-sac of despair and cynicism. Sometimes trauma maims us so badly that we fall into numb detachment; sometimes trauma makes us come alive for the first time. “AG had done something marvelous: he had kept his love alive despite everything that had happened…"Alessandro grapples with the past and present and forces them into harmonious co-existence. Like Frederic Henry in Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms,” Alessandro falls in love with (and loses) a nurse as he convalesces after being wounded in battle, but Helprin’s tone sharply contrasts with the bleakness of Hemingway’s. “A Soldier of the Great War" valiantly charges against the machine guns and barbed wire of modernity in an attempt to assert the freedom to believe in the possibility of benign patterns in a seemingly random and cruel universe, and it attempts to reveal humans as more than just ants, flicked by blind fate into a fire where we sizzle and pop. Alessandro calmly entreats us to consider the possibility that immortality (and the world beyond our immediate vision) is capable of being perceived by our senses and is no less probable or less logical than the miracle that life even exists at all. Into the exciting and traditional story narrative, Helprin weaves discourses about paintings like Giorgione’s “La Tempesta,” and music like Verdi’s “La Traviata,” and elucidates how art filters our pain and allows us to borrow the vision of the great masters in order to redeem our sorrow by creative memory. Helprin is justly famous for having written “Winter’s Tale,” and SOGW, though less fantastical, is no less lyrical or visionary. It summons me to ascend to a cloud by observing swallows. "But of all the birds resting in the trees along the Tiber at the end of October, none was half the flier, half the sounder, half the whistler or half the darter of the swallow. The swallows flew in great circles, picking up speed and rising like leaves in a whirlwind. They ascended in this madness, climbing up and up until they flew among the higher and thicker clouds in the soft and rosy walls into which they would disappear and from which they would suddenly burst in surprise"Helprin frames his tale in the first and last chapters by portraying Alessandro as an old man walking along the Appian Way with a young peasant boy, who listens to the old man’s story of a life spent giving and receiving. The teacher has finally found a student in Nicolo, and I too am a student as I read, enraptured through crinkled brows of concentration for 900 pages during my tempestuous holiday season. Helprin helped me to find my voice again, because, after having written more than 300 book reviews, I was unable to write a review on Goodreads for six months due to personal circumstances that seemed like metaphoric combat. When I returned, like a soldier from the front, my words had evaporated, and I felt like I had no ability to describe my last 20 books to the GR community, but I wrote my draft of this review in 20 minutes, immediately after finishing the book.Like the reunion of two important characters in the book, I also reunited with “A Solider of the Great War,” which I last read 20 years ago and which I had loved, but, having read a library copy, I was unable to highlight and revisit this masterpiece--as I usually do my favorite books. Much has happened in my life over the course of two decades, but I reunited with a lover whom I thought I had lost and with whom I will never part again. I also felt reunited with a part of myself. In addition to vowing to read everything published by Mark Helprin, I vow to read this book at least once every ten years for a soul-check. I desperately need writers like Helprin, who give me strength for the battle of life and who teach me to hear the aria of life amidst the cacophony of absurdity, and to prepare myself for my inevitable disappearance and absorption into the flight of swallows.This book speaks more to my yearning than to my belief, and it exists outside the realms of theory and proof. Out of the tempest and lightening flashes come peace and contentment. I behold the scent that arises from the crush of the smallest pine needle beneath my boots and pray that my fragile and insignificant life has purpose that will ascend like the mysterious aroma of resin.
What do You think about A Soldier Of The Great War (2005)?
My copy of this book was 860 pages. I read 400 pages and finally came to the conclusion that it was a waste of time because I had practically no curiosity about the main or subordinate characters. I tossed it.This book was a bestseller when it came out. I have no idea why. It is essentially a collection of 1,500 word anecdotes with a thin film of connecting glue.Most of what came out of the characters' mouths was implausible. There's an awful lot of inflated dialogue that sounded to me like words tumbling over themselves in search of a profound insight. Most of these attempts at insight did not quite rise to the level of Zorba the Greek's observation: "Clever people and grocers, they weigh everything."At the very least, a novel must give me at least one engaging character and be written with enough skill to make me curious about what is going to happen to that character. A Soldier of the Great War did not meet those basic standards. After reading half the book, I came to the conclusion it was just one damn thing after another, and it was boring.
—Sam Negri
Honestly this is the greatest book ever written! It's fact, not opinion, greatest book ever! I am currently reading it for the 3rd time. The way Alessandro Giuliani, the protagonist, views the world is truly beautiful and has become my credo (if I can be so arrogant). Mark Helprin is a gifted, profound, illustrative, comical, writer, and I would recommend this book to any reader. One thing I should mention is that I have heard that the first eighty pages are slow and hard reading. I completely disagree with this statement, personally I didn't want the beginning to end, until I realized that rest of the book was just as amazing. This book has a little of everything: history, fiction, comedy, tragedy, adventure, reflection, comradery and romance. READ IT!!!!!!!!!
—Zac
Skimmed some, wandered in and out, but was always drawn back in and wanted to stay with Alessandro to the end. Another of Helprin's brilliant characterizations, intimately realized while running the gamut of a lifetime of events, from the most personal to the epic.From Booklist: "Helprin has a great gift for meaningful, dazzlingly detailed description as well as a nimble sense of humor and a keen perception of life as a jumble of the holy and profane, a chaos that can only be tamed by the power of love."
—Bennet
