Catch-22

A grim and satirical look at WWII through the cagey eyes of a young bombardier. Committed to surviving the war, Yossarian launches into scheme after scheme to evade his commanding officers' apparent desire to kill him. The resident general keeps volunteering his men to fly more missions and partake in dangerous actions.

Yossarian tries getting himself grounded for mental health reasons but finds himself denied by the titular Catch-22. It's a rule that requires insane pilots to request relief from duty, but the moment they do, they are proven sane because they don't want to fly dangerous missions anymore.

This book is clever, funny, dark, and deeply moving. A haunting novel about the horrors of war and the far worse horrors of bureaucracy.

It was the 1960s and I was very young, on a family road trip where all I heard was my mother saying, "Yossarian." All I saw was her laughing so hard she could barely keep reading aloud to my dad as he drove. Decades later, I learned Yossarian is the protagonist in a war novel (anti-war; anti-bureaucracy, really), and more decades later I finally picked up the book. The mess of its incoherent, non-linear presentation tempted me to set it aside, and the only thing that kept me in it was the hilarity.

I’ve talked to more readers who abandoned the book than finished it, so there’s an element of pride in having persisted through a difficult read ... and come out loving it. Because, counter-balancing the hilarity, Heller does things like show more arranging just six discrete words to haunt us about the horrors of war:

"I’m cold," Snowden said. "I’m cold."
"There, there," said Yossarian. "There, there."

If you’ve read the novel, you’ve gone now to get a tissue. show less

This book is not an easy pick up---it starts confusing and never really settles. But I recommend you do anyway, because it's everything at once: funny and tragic, logical and absurd.

This was my second time reading this book, and I've been thinking about why it still wasn't a very easy read, and why despite of that I like it even more than the first time around. The non-chronological narrative definitely doesn't make it any easier, and there's also a lot of characters to follow.

But I think the main factor is how the absurdity of it all is emphasized over and over. The first time the term Catch-22 is introduced, it's just a single funny thing among all the absurd things going on. We only know it's significant because it's also the title show more of the book. But the absurdity keeps ramping up to new levels up to the point where you realize that the characters are actually quite sensible, given the circumstances. And then the book drops another bomb of insanity. show less

I've read the Croatian translation of this book.

Absolutely loved it. It's funny and tragic in the same time, very well written, bringing you back and forth to the same situations, sometimes giving you so little information about the themes the characters discuss that it frustrates you but afterwards fills all the holes left in the plot.
A masterpiece of satirical war literature, depicting the games and little wars for personal gains that go on in the background without sympathy for the little, simple soldiers.
Loved it, the characters, the style, the paradoxes, portrayals of the battles in the sky and the whole representation of the goddamned-man world that gets high on killing, raping and enslaving people in their violent and show more power-greedy lives.

Had a little problem with the treatment of the female characters, but wasn't sure if it was in the sake of building this patriarchal-warmongering universe.

Can't wait to read the original! show less

This is a terrible book that I shouldn't love. I love this book.

The narrative is all over the place and, at times, seemingly impossible to follow. The whole thing is confusing and shouldn't work. It works and I followed it all.

The characters are absurd, as is their dialogue. They are so ridiculously unbelievable, it's almost insulting that Heller expects to buy into them. I bought into them all.

Honestly, I can't imagine how hard it must have been to write a book that throws out contradictions with almost every sentence. Heller not only pulled it off, but the man had me outright laughing all through this book.

Seriously, none of this should work, yet somehow, Heller brings it all together and turns what could have been an incomprehensible show more mess into a funny, poignant, and ultimately extremely important work.

God, I love this book. show less

At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war.
His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he's committed to flying, he's trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he's sane and show more therefore, ineligible to be relieved show less

You can say all you want about non-linear narratives and free-association and black satire, but Jesus Christ if this supposedly comic book wasn't an absolute chore to read. Having heard so much praise for it, at first I was disappointed and thought that perhaps it was just the usual case of heightened expectations for a modern classic. Catch-22 has become an archetype for much subsequent comic fiction, so perhaps, I thought, like many such ground-breaking works it looks tame in retrospect.

But after a hundred or so pages of this swampy, bloated, repetitive prose, with many hundreds more to go, it just became a chore. It is verbose but surprisingly unquotable. Its many characters have little to differentiate them, and none are as show more interesting as Heller seems to think. It has no plot but despite that it is incredibly long, and yet doesn't seem to say anything at all beyond 'war is crazy, people are crazy' in a rather unsubtle and juvenile way.

There are more subtle things going on, but the non-linear narrative and the fractured set-up of jokes are the sort of things that you can only really identify if you read the CliffNotes or re-read the book closely more than a few times. And when the first time of reading is so barely tolerable, what sort of sane person would go for a second, or third, or fourth, just to be able to notice some oh-so-clever literary techniques? Catch-22 is one for the pseuds and the posturers, and for the madmen. And if there are those who can truly stomach it and are not just posturing – well, I raise a glass. show less