Group Read, May 2018: The Case of Sergeant Grischa

Our May 2018 group read is The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig. Please join in the read and post any comments on this thread.

I'm new to LibraryThing, and I'd like to join in with y'all, but I can't find the book available as either an ebook or an audiobook anywhere online. Any suggestions for how I might find it?

Welcome to the group. I bought my copy off eBay, and I see Amazon has copies. Not aware of any digital versions.

I got a copy on Amazon. Read 25 pages. Not the right book for me right after Simplicissimus—too many men wandering around war-torn Europe. A century and a half apart, warfare is very different, but not different enough! Still I persevere.

100 pages in and am just not being grabbed by this book. It is too disjointed. Is anybody else reading?

>5 annamorphic: I made a start this morning and don't mind it so far. It's very readable (at least in translation) and at this stage (page 63) isn't overdosing on the horrors of the war. With the best part of 500 pages to go though this may all change.

I can't recall reading a book about the Eastern front in WWI before, so I'm looking forward to learning something new. (That is other than our group read of The Good Soldier Svejk which could not exactly be labelled educational).

I just got a copy from the library, but I have a couple of other books I need to tackle first.

I finished the book this evening. It turned out to be quite different from your standard "horrors of the trenches" WW1 fare. In fact there was little about battles and carnage at all.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS ALERT

The positives (apart from the lack of mud and massacre) were the vivid descriptions of the locations and the seasons. I did find the book slowed to a snails pace in the second half as the two camps dealing with the fate of Sergeant Grischa debate their positions. It also seemed odd that Generals commanding men who were dying by their thousands each day would spend so much effort over the life of one foreign combatant; the principles involved in the dispute are discussed at length late in the book. Perhaps my biggest issue with the whole thing was that I had little sympathy with Grischa; his predicament seems to be almost entirely self-inflicted by his poor choices and lack of planning.

Having said all that, I did actually quite like the story, even if it failed to shed any more light on the Eastern Front than The Good Soldier Svejk.

I finished the book this afternoon, I did enjoy it overall, but at times I felt like there was more than one novel crammed into one. The subject matter was unusual as I have read about WW1 more from the German, British, French and American side. The absurdity of war was well dealt with and I felt some of the meanders were probably indicative of the situation at the time.

I should probably start this one soon as I suggested it. D'oh! I am really behind in my reading these days.

I started this a few days ago and, so far, am enjoying it. I like the structure of the first book: an outsider perspective (failing to observe or secretly watching Gischa) and then the same scene, more or less, from Grischa's perspective.