265. Under Fire

Under Fire
Henri Barbusse
Around 350 pages
1916

I thought that All Quiet on the Western Front was the quintessential World War I novel, but I guess Under Fire beat it by quite a few years. It's hard to say which novel is better; both contain grim accounts of trench warfare that are hard to stomach.

Under Fire doesn't exactly have a plot. The novel is made up of journal entries from a French soldier during World War I. He describes the violence he witnesses in shocking, fairly disgusting detail. He also relates the deaths of several of his fellow soldiers, as well as an account of a trench assault.

Obviously, it is impossible to capture all the horrors of war in a novel format, but Barbusse does an effective job of communicating the emotions of the soldiers, from absolute despair to steely resignation. It was surprising reading this novel after The Inferno, the other Barbusse novel on the List, that was much more domestic in its plot. Just shows how many ordinary men were ripped from normality into the nightmare of warfare.  

This isn't a book I would recommend for the quarantimes, since we are all miserable enough already, but still a moving novel.

RATING: ****-

Interesting Facts:

Published before the war ended.

One of the first novels about World War I to be published.

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No.

241. The Inferno

The Inferno
Henri Barbusse
1908
Around 100 pages

This is a good novel to read in quarantine times, as we all cooped up in our houses/apartments, unable to leave. Hopefully, you will not be motivated by this creeper to drill a hole in your wall and spy on all your neighbors. But if you do choose that course of action and see anything juicy, please let me know.

Our unnamed narrator discovers that he can spy on the next room in a Paris boarding house through a peephole. He sees all sorts of things, including adultery, incest, death, parties, and Catholic priests being terrible.

I liked the setup for this novel, as it is very Rear Window-y, though obviously this came first. I was just as intrigued as the narrator by the characters he saw on the other side of the wall, although I was slightly disappointed by which ones he fixated on. It wasn't hard to view this as an analogy for the life of the writer. Always watching, breathlessly recording, able to see the flaws and weaknesses of everybody around him but powerless to forge a meaningful existence for himself.

Overall, a worthwhile read and short to boot, even if Barbusse did not reach the most cheerful conclusions by the end of the novel.

RATING: ****-

Interesting Facts:

Popular in France and sold more than 100,000 copies in 1917.

Barbusse was a lifelong friend of Albert Einstein.

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