The soldier is Chris Baldry, married to the beautiful, polished, empty Kitty. Suffering from shell-shock Chris forgets fifteen years of his life, including the ten years of his marriage to Kitty, and remembers his first love, the kind and generous Margaret. A short, beautifully written novel. ( )

I don't really know what to say about this book that won't sound really trite. In the absence of a list of adjectives that would certainly sound silly, I make the following preliminary statements: it earned a rare five-star rating from me, ended up being tagged "favorite", Rebecca West was added to my favorite authors, her other books have been added to my wishlist, along with collections of her letters and biographies. I want to read it again right now; I never want to read anything ever again because everything else will seem like trash by comparison; I want to immediately read everything I own because the book reminded me how much I love to read.

Oh, and it affected my subconscious so deeply I had a nightmare that was almost certainly influenced by the book.

My advice - read it when you know you won't be disturbed by anyone. The book is not long, but the writing style is complex & many of the sentences bear re-reading in order to even fully grasp their most basic meaning. West tends to put the ultimate subject of the sentence at the end of a lengthy descriptive phrase. Also, reading the book - for me at least - was truly like being pulled away from myself & my surroundings. I was quite disgruntled when I was interrupted during my reading.

Quick context for one of my favorite passages: The main characters in The Return of the Soldier are Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked upper class soldier, Kitty Baldry, his "perfect" wife whom he no longer remembers, Jenny Baldry, Chris's cousin who lives with him and his wife and who narrates the story, and Margaret West (nee Allington), a lower-class woman whom Chris was in love with 15 years previously. When Chris returns from war, he has lost 15 years of memory and thinks he is still courting Margaret. In this passage, Jenny has had a vision of Chris in a store examining two crystal orbs - in one, he sees Margaret, in the other he sees Jenny and Kitty.

This passage is actually one of the more straightforward, stylistically & it actually doesn't illustrate what I was talking about above, unfortunately, but it seems to me typical of the understated, yet devastating emotion West is capable of conveying in this book. After I finished the section that this passage caps, I was actually breathless & stopped reading for the night, so that I could linger with the memory of that final sentence. (I feel quite melodramatic, I am not usually one for expressing emotions about books....)

"We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. No one weeps for this shattering of our world." ( )

This was a tragedy chock full of lovely prose. Her comment that "Not a sentence should be wasted." is a standard she holds herself to in this lovely short novel. ( )

West's short book (almost a novella, really), was written in 1918. It is the story of a man returning from the war, suffering from shell-shock, and unable to remember the last 15 years of his life. Grappling with this are three women: Kitty, his wife of ten years; Margaret, the woman whom he loved 15 years ago; and Jenny, his cousin, who narrates the story, and whose thoughts provide the discussion of the damage caused by war.

Poignant, stark, no less moving or apropos for being set in the war of nearly a century ago rather than today's conflicts—an almost perfect gem of a book.

About the only complaint I could have is with the edition. I wish I had ordered the 198 page Garden City edition instead of the Digireads paperback. The latter caused my eyes to swim from the small font and very closely-set lines of text. ( )

This was a beautiful and brilliant book. It made me remember how in love with reading I was after reading Romeo and Juliet in seventh grade. The stories aren't similar, but I had that same reaction. The story sweeps you in with beauty and brilliance, and tears you apart with the same. If Shakespeare and Henry James had come together to form their perfect idea of a writer, and to combine their styles into one which could strike at readers long after a book was closed, the result would have been Rebecca West. I'll be reading it again before long, once I recover from all the thoughts encased here, and in mind, after reading only once. ( )