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Title: The Good Soldier Svejk: and His Fortunes in the World War (Penguin Classics)
ISBN: 0140449914
Author:
Jaroslav Hasek
Publicate Date: 2005-12-27
Publish: 2005-12-27
List Price: $16.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $8.93
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $6.78
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.88
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Hasek and Abe Lincoln
There's no getting around the fact that this book is funny and long, the latter characteristic often working might and main to detract from the former. Whether you muddle through to the end or not, it's a book you can dive into at any point and get anything from a chuckle to a snort to a few flecks of spit on the page.
Hasek's brilliant ability to recount funny anecdotes reminds me of Doris Kearns Goodwin's portrayal of Abe Lincoln in Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Our greatest president was as much a lover and chronicler of tales as Hasek, and it's a sure bet that growing up in backwoods Kentucky Lincoln commanded a pantheon of scatalogical tales on par with Hasek's that never made it into the standard Lincoln hagiographies.
Svejk will be greatly enjoyed when read hard on the heels of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August or Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (Bloom's Guides).
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2: witty writing
I have to say that reading this book reminded me of my own service in the Greek army and all the moments of hilarity. Witty humour though it shows its age. Unfortunately an unfinished novel, but a classic all the same.
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3: Humor on different levels
The good soldier Svejk is one of those books labelled as "literature" that has to be read with an understanding of its context to be fully understood. This is not a fluffly beach reading novel that you pick up, read in a couple of hours, and then forget as soon as you close the cover. Instead, it is a very long criticism of the craziness of Austro-Hungarian society during World War I.
The good soldier Svejk is a czech who is either extremely stupid, or who is manipulating the system to his own benefit. Depending on the anecdote, you will interpret his actions either way. To give you a good idea of what I mean, Svejk is introduced to us as a person who makes his living by supplying dogs to customers. The dogs are mongrels of no particular provenance and frequently stolen, but Svejk supplies them to you with a certificate telling you that the dog is a pure-bred-whatever-you-wanted. On the other hand, when Svejk is in the army and is supposed to travel to his regiment, he manages somehow to stop the train, and then, instead of going south, he leaves town going west...
However, Svejk is merely a tool for the author to poke fun at his society. When you read the book, pay more attention to how other people react to Svejk and how they interact with each other. This is where the humor gets downright savage! The author was not a big fan of religious figures as every chaplain and priest is shown as a womanizing drunk. Officers are amazingly inept and the higher the rank the more bizarre the behavior. At one point Svejk is pointed to by a general and recommended for a bronze metal and a battlefield promotion. Why? Because he was the first to jump up and salute while sitting in a communal outhouse when the general came in to inspect it!
In addition to Svejk, there are several other characters that are very memorable. The lowest ranking officer is Cadet Biegler - who is the most ardently patriotic and theoretical officer in the whole book and therefore receives the most verbal abuse from his superiors. The book is very raw in some cases - Cadet Biegler gets drunk, eats too many bon bons and as a result has an "accident" in his clothes. This gets him diagnosed as having dysentery, but when the dysentery ward at the hospital proves to be full, he is instead sent to the Cholera ward which creates all kinds of further adventures!
The early parts of the book are absolutely stunning in their hilarity but the middle parts suffer. At this point, Svejk is on a long train ride with his regiment and he meets up with a one year volunteer. This leads to literally hundreds of pages of bizarre dialog and anecdotal story telling that is purely pointless except within the larger context of the book's message. This is probably the weakest part of the book.
One of the strength of this edition is the inclusion of the caricatures that illustrate the book. They do a great job of giving the readers visual reminders of what is going on.
Unfortunately, the book has no ending. The author died before he could finish the tale, so we only know that after 750+ pages, Svejk is with his regiment as they approach the front ... and we have no idea what happens to him when real bullets fly and shells explode around him. Or, do they?
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4: the good soldier svejk
This is an hilarious novel that was a forerunner to catch 22. We have the Good Soldier Svejk for WWI, Catch 22 for WWII, and to a lesser extent Forrest Gump for Viatnam.
Recommend to those wanting a good chuckle
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5: Picaresque antiwar classic
This is a beautiful and inexpensive edition, with the original cartoonish illustrations. The translation is lively and the book can be hilarious, but I bogged down about halfway through--it seems to go on and on, as picaresque novels do, but a bit too much in the same vein for my taste. It was written for serialization, so it's probably not meant to be read at one gulp, and likely I'll pick it up at some point later.
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