Books

Just finished this:

People say that writing an anti-war war story is impossible. Even if the patriotism, the institutions, the politics and the propaganda are all revealed to be hollow  excuses to justify sending another generation to their doom, the camaraderie, the sacrifices and heroic deeds of the individual soldiers will make war look glorious. Many have tried to avoid this trap; most have failed. William March’s Company K succeeds in this goal, but at a high price. There are two main techniques that are instrumental for this: First and foremost is the structure of the text. The book is a collection of 113 short vignettes, each one about a soldier of the company. This results in the reader never getting attached to any particular person, since we never have time for that attachment to form. But this also kills any semblance of an objective for the narrative and therefore the tension. Joseph Heller‘s Catch22 has a similar episodic structure, but we stay with Yossarian and his companions for a long time. The objective is clear: Survival. This allows for the narrative to develop stakes and tension. Will they survive? Who will die? In Company K we follow the collective, but a company can’t die, and we already know how the war ended. So there isn't really any objective.  There aren’t any stakes and neither is there tension whether the objective will be achieved or not. 

March's second method of achieving the anti-war war story is the tone of the story. It's remarkably bleak, even amongst its peers. The "good guys" do terrible things and commit horrible crimes, justified only by hollow propaganda that is also portrayed as such. Even the humor is black as night. This makes for a quite depressing reading experience. 

In summary: this might be one of the best tries at achieving the anti-war war story, but it definitely isn’t the most readable try.