A Soldier of the Great War

I really wanted to dislike this book after being annoyed by Helprin's sometimes pompous (and even empty) writing style (i.e. too many of his descriptors mean nothing but the sound of their words on the ear), but, my goodness, I loved this book. Against my better judgement, I found myself mesmerized by the main character, the landscape, the war, and the consistently engaging conversation about beauty, truth, life, and God. This is one of those books that needs to be over 700 pages, so you can spend quality time with the character and story. I was very upset to finish it.

Imagine a novelization of Giorgione's renaissance painting, La Tempesta. In Mark Helprin's interpretation the man in the painting is a soldier on leave from a war still brewing in the background, represented by the storm. His salvation and sanity are preserved by the woman and child - the beauty in the world. In the novel the soldier is Alessandro, who in 1964 is an aged figure grown wise as a professor of aesthetics. Helprin is also playing with the 'great war' appellation usually describing World War I and the setting for this novel, encompassing also the struggle with mortality and its meaning.

In some respects this is a fairy tale for adults like 'Winter's Tale'. This one strips away all of the magical realism, but Alessandro leads show more a charmed life in which when things go well they go ecstatically well, and when they go wrong it can be hilariously wrong or provides opportunity. Alessandro feels that, and he lives his life with tremendous risk and daring. His true talent is for rolling with the punches and finding beauty everywhere he turns. He is especially keen on discovering it in women, and it is the women he meets who empower him to persevere more than anything else. But he finds it as well in children, in art, in poignant moments with his father, and in the spirit of the men who fight alongside him on the Italian-Austrian front.

Alessandro's outlook is optimistic without being naive, and in passing through the madness of war it is subjected to one of the most rigorous tests a man can know. He leaves his sanity open to question without resisting the madness, and in this way it washes over him. His unshakeable faith in a god also helps to see him through, without the need for organized religion. If there is any confusion about how his philosophy informs his life story and vice versa, Helpin makes it all subtly clear in the final part. Bravo. show less

I just finished reading A Soldier of the Great War and think I'm going to remember this as one of the best books I've read. I know this is personal but it spoke to me on a bunch of levels I'm interested in like aesthetics, religion, mountaineering, WW1, father-son relationships, love, adventure, the pointlessness of war, etc. However this novel was much more than the themes. The writing kept me going with zippy, interesting and often unexpected dialog, delightful observations of small details, a story structure that was unusual but in the end, it might have been the only way to spin this yarn. I identified with Alessandro as a young man, an old man and almost everything between. At about 800 pages, I don't think this book could have show more been much shorter -- author Mark Helpin has just so much to say, it is breathtaking.

Some people have criticized it as being too long, the use of magical realism, excessive, etc but I think, personally, that they have missed the point of the book -- which was to describe a remarkable life that was buffeted and shaped by events totally out of his control, and also a world that was just plain out of control. Yes, it's unrealistic that Alessandro survives some of the events and experiences but if he didn't, the book would have been exactly that much shorter. Only those who survive get to write their story, but hopefully they bring the dead along with them and that is exactly what Helprin does with Alessandro. To me, there was one use of magical realism, maybe, in that of the character Orfeo. I believe Helprin is saying it is the only possible explanation for the inexplicable lunacy of Italy's military decisions during the Great War.

A worthwhile, memorable and rewarding read, in my opinion. show less

Confusing ‘epic’ with just ‘very long’, this book has entertaining sections but cannot justify an investment of 860 pages. It tells the story of one Alessandro Giuliani, an Italian soldier who goes off to fight in 1914 and soon shows a propensity for escaping death and injury which is only matched by his proficiency as a rider, his irresistibility to women, his prowess as a mountain-climber, his fortitude, his moral strength, his physical strength, his perceptive art criticism, his religious insight, his cutting one-liners, his rakish anti-authoritarianism, and his ability to attract woodland creatures like a Disney princess:

Perhaps because he had been without his family, solitary for so long, the deer in deer preserves and even show more in the wild sometimes allowed him to stroke their cloud-spotted flanks and touch their faces. And on the hot terra cotta floors of roof gardens and in other, less likely places, though it may have been accidental, doves had flown into his hands. Most of the time they held in place and stared at him with their round gray eyes until they sailed away with a feminine flutter of wings that he found beautiful not only for its delicacy and grace, but because the sound echoed through what then became an exquisite silence.

That's from page one, and had me muttering ‘oh fuck off…’ under my breath already. As well as being overwritten it is also just clunky (that long, commaless string of words that begins the third sentence is especially unwieldy), and although what follows is usually perfectly readable, this paragraph does get to the heart of the book's core problem, which is that it takes itself far too seriously while not taking its subject seriously enough.

Although Helprin is pitching this as a grown-up literary treatment of war, it has almost nothing in common with the works of writers who were actually in the First World War and who are talked up on the book's back cover. It reminded me more of historical romances like The Three Musketeers than of anything by Hemingway or Remarque; Helprin's hero is just not living a plausible experience of the conflict. He is whisked away from certain death so many times and in such unlikely ways (seconds before his execution by firing squad, for instance) that it is hard not to start finding it comic as he saunters through yet another cliff-hanger untouched while the poor mortals around him drop like malnourished flies.

Alessandro is, indeed, a kind of virile superman. Again, we are supposed to take this seriously but I found it mostly laughable. He is always the biggest, bravest, most commanding presence in every scene. He cannot walk ten feet away from his division without women falling at his feet: on one occasion he sleeps with a woman sitting next to him on an overnight train, while on another he arranges a sexual liaison with someone seconds after meeting them while jogging across a city square. He refuses to have sex with an adoring prostitute, however, because he is also a paragon of moral fibre. In reality, of course, sexual desperation among soldiers was almost pathological, most of them were not very good at speaking to real women, and queues for the run-down brothels went literally around the block. A braver and better book might have attempted that story, but instead we are treated to some kind of weird heroic wish-fulfilment figure.

Alessandro's exemplary traits might have been more bearable had he at least been forced to change or develop them in adversity, but he doesn't. He begins the book with an unerring sense of the truth of the world, and his losses and hardships do nothing but confirm him in his convictions. Indeed, he seems to treat the pain and misery of war as something like the ritual mortification undergone by a Christian saint. This is not inappropriate given the religious nature of Alessandro's worldview. Helprin would like his hero to come across as a kind of Herman Hesse-style magus figure, and there are many wistful and high-minded passages in here about God's beauty and consolation and how the light and truth of the world can be apprehended by those with an eye for it. These sections sound wise and sensible, but if you look at them for a second, they turn out to say nothing much at all except that you just have to have faith. In the context of the First World War, I found this a bizarre, offensive, and ultimately very conservative kind of snake-oil for an author to be pushing.

Still, there are some lovely descriptions of Rome along the way. show less

The Great War in Italy had its share of trench warfare, but most of the fighting was up north in the mountains, where Italy abuts what was then the AustroHungarian Empire. The soldier of this story, Alessandro, grows up in Rome, and is studying aesthetics when the war begins; he enlists because he feels he can better avoid the worst of it if he volunteers.

Alas, that was not to be. While he leads what seems to be a charmed life, the war in all its cruelty and fatality whirling around him in various venues and battles.

The story is enclosed in the simple adventure of an old man walking to a distant village with a young man, to whom he tells the history of his war and also much more. Helprin uses the character's love of beauty as permission show more for vivid and often beautiful descriptions of even ugly and terrifying events, but does not forget to show how Alessandro learns, hardens, and finds meaning in life in spite of, or because of, the war.

There are funny scenes as well as tragic ones, some of them just short of magical realism; some villains get their comeuppance promptly, some long after it does any good, some not at all. Many good people die, some almost by accident, some quite deliberately. Ultimately, Alessandro is left with the idea of beauty as that with which God comforts his broken children, and the idea of life as the balance of risk and hope. show less

An old man looks back on his terrible, angry, defining experiences in WWI... with a mixed wonder. It's a strange mixture. Very powerful parts, but also a bit long and winding. In some ways it is really thoughtful and complex, in some ways it's profound and really disturbing and yet in some ways it was a little cheesy and gung-ho soldier. When I read it I was bothered by the length, but now a year away I couldn't care less about the length, it's the good parts that stick. On a side note, I see a lot of extra meanings behind the old man's walk, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

To describe this novel in one word - easy. That would be - interminable. The book simply went on and on and on and ... This is the second Helprin book I have read and I thought the same of the first. I doubt I will read any more of his books as this was simply a case of bloat, and excessive bloat at that. What this book needed was a good editor. I am not even sure how to class this book. It is not a war novel. It is not historical fiction. It is not farce. I don't believe that it even does justice to the incredible suffering that went on all along the Italian Front in World War I. What it is, perhaps, is a peaon to the beauties of the city of Rome. Other than that, I don't think there is much to recommend it.

I wanted to read this book show more because there is so little out there, at least in English, written on WWI. Since it is the Centennary of World War I, I thought I would read this one as part of the group read here on LT. I only finished it because I did find the charcter of Alessandro of interest. However, unless you have absolutly nothing else to read on this subject, and you might be trapped in a car or airport with nothing else to listen to or read, go find a different title. show less