Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... The Good Soldier Svejk (1922)by Jaroslav Hašek
» 31 more War Literature (14) 20th Century Literature (238) THE WAR ROOM (48) Favorite Long Books (129) World War I Fiction (14) Best War Stories (31) Books Read in 2023 (1,534) Favourite Books (1,272) 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (353) Books Read in 2020 (3,544) 1920s (67) Read This Next (99) Franklit (37) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.
First, will say there are a couple of misogynist bits and one particularly bad racist page right near the start of volume 2 chapter 3 that can easily be skipped Overall there are lots of laugh out moments. The rambling anecdotes of Svejk are inane and "utter tripe" as Lieutenant Lukas describes them but Hasek (and the translator) writes the stories fluently so that even when there's not really a joke they're a pleasure to read. I think in general the only wider criticism I have against it there's too much filler where nothing is happening - it's still fine to read, just could easily have been 5 star with a bit of trimming. The humour is great mostly and the regular juxtaposition of a light-hearted story with a deadly conclusion is always striking. The general illustration of the absurdity and futility of war and militaries in general is great and shown through many funny vignettes. Not quite as satisfying on a reread, but still one of the great 20th Century picaresques and a seminal war satire, passing the baton directly from Simplicissimus to the likes of Heller and Eastlake. The characters are indelible: the terminally uptight Lt Dub, the apelike, arm-swinging glutton Baloun, the long-suffering but essentially noble Lt Lukáš, and of course Švejk himself with his inexhaustible fund of pointless anecdotes and reductio ad absurdums, a kind of super-moronic Sancho Panza (to Lukáš' Quixote?) whose response to the idiocy of endless war is to meet it on its own idiotic, interminable terms. Hašek's disgust for the role of the Church in war is extremely palpable. Here he is describing some prayer-cards, penned by the Archbishop of Budapest and distributed to the men by a couple of well-meaning old ladies: According to the venerable archbishop the merciful Lord ought to cut the Russians, British, Serbs, French and Japanese into mincemeat, and make a paprika goulash out of them. The merciful Lord ought to bathe in the blood of the enemies and murder them all, as the ruthless Herod had done with the Innocents. And although the plot, such as it is, never makes it to any actual combat (I wonder if it would have done had the author lived to complete it?), the horror of the front is never far away. Here's an anonymous character in a discussion on the prevalence of shit on the battlefield: 'And a dead man, who lay on top of the cover with his legs hanging down and half of whose head had been torn off by shrapnel, just as though he'd been cut in half, he too in the last moment shitted so much that it ran from his trousers over his boots into the trenches mixed with blood. And half his skull together with his brains lay right underneath. A chap doesn't even notice how it happens to him.' Ultimately though, Švejk is a pre-postmodern work, the theatre of war meeting the theatre of the absurd. Exchanges like this, very near the end of the book, capture the spirit of it, I think: Vaněk asked with interest: And at its heart, amid all the inanity, the tedium, the degradations, if you squint very hard, there's a kernel of something decent: Lieutenant Lukáš walked along the track thinking: 'I ought to have given him a few on the jaw, but instead I've been gossiping with him as though he were a friend.' no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesGood Soldier Svejk (1-4) Belongs to Publisher Series — 12 more Has the (non-series) sequelHas the adaptationHas as a studyNotable ListsBulgarian Big Read (24) Hungarian Big Read (66)
Classic Literature.
Fiction.
HTML:Jaroslav Hasek's world-famous satirical farce The Good Soldier Svejk has been translated into over sixty languages, and is one of the best-known Czech works ever published. A soldier in the First World War who never actually sees any combat, Josef Svejk is The Good Soldier's awkward protagonist - and none of the other characters can quite decide whether his bumbling efforts to get to the front are genuine or not. Often portrayed as one of the first anti-war novels, Hasek's classic satire is a tour-de-force of modernist writing, influencing later writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Joseph Heller. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.8635Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages West and South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Slovene, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, and Macedonian) Czech Czech fiction 1900–1989LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. Penguin AustraliaAn edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia. |
Der erste Teil ist der beste, den vierten Teil kann man sich auch sparen.. ( )