All Quiet on the Western Front: Book Review

Remarque's Modern Classic on the Horror of War

The horror of poisoned skin and flesh, mangled arms and legs, whistling shells, hopeless moans, and ubiquitous filth complemented the sterile wall between Paul Baumer and his father and mother and sister when he was on leave. The war had destroyed his youth and any hunger for sunlight, twitter and soft skin. When he turned the schoolbook pages, he realized all the texts’ fragrances sweet or pungent had fled into the misty dawn. His past had fallen away and his future withered, leaving him in a limbo of body parts, scorched earth and bomb fragments. Only when he returned to the trenches could he feel at home. But when he looked into the enemy’s eyes, he would see himself, a soldier fighting for a country that would no longer recognize him, a future that would expel him, and a new generation who could not understand him.

W.W.I. Trench

    Remarque depicted not just the horror of W.W.I but that of all wars, no matter how noble and inspiring the rhetoric. Whichever side triumphs, the soldiers on both side will lose; he will lose his youth, his innocence and his belief in human decency. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the, if not the, greatest war novel.

Erich Maria Remarque

Patrick Süskind's Perfume

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has no scent but can identify the minutest one. To create a perfume that would seduce people into loving and worshiping him, he searches far and wide for the perfect ingredient. When he found that scent on a teenage girl, he intended to extract it from her even if that meant killing her.

In Perfume, Patrick Süskind has created a Gothic tale as dark as Frankenstein, but a tale of creation of the perfect perfume rather than the perfect man. Scents and fragrances dominate the book and details of the extraction processes make the book a good read. But Grenouille is a greater monster than Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. Through his misery and suffering, Grenouille learned to hate humanity and to take revenge upon it. He has no conscience and his only goal is to create the perfect perfume. If he had to kill innocent girls, so be it. He aspires to be God. He wanted the people to love and worship him. He succeeds. He becomes all-powerful, but without his own smell, he has no identity. That is his grief. In the end, he destroys himself.

Patrick Süskind

Book Review of Michael Tanner's Schopenhauer

Michael Tanner in Schopenhauer introduces the philosopher’s idea for readers who may want to read The World as Will and Representation.

Like Kant, Schopenhauer believes that through our senses we can only experience the representation of the world, in Kant’s words, the phenomenal world. But he departs from Kant in his concept of will and willing. For him, willing is the root of all suffering. We seek to satisfy our needs, but once they are met, we become disillusioned and seek to satisfy greater needs and the process never stops. The most common example is that we eat to satisfy our hunger, but having eaten we would feel hungry again. For Schopenhauer this never ending striving and the swing between hope and disillusionment create suffering. His ideas has influenced thinkers like Thomas Mann whose novel The Magic Mountain reflects that search and striving and the resulting suffering and disillusionment.

The World as Will and Representation

For Schopenhauer, the Will, as the summation of individual wills, is a unified cosmic principle under all representations, a mindless urging toward no definite end. And such an idea had influenced thinkers like Hartshorne and Whitehead.

Arthur Schopenhauer

But Schopenhauer not only influenced thinkers, but even more so, artists and perhaps musicians. The ideas of ceaseless striving and the cycle of hope and despair appears to lend expressions to the various arts.

However, as Michaal Tanner points out, Schopenhauer’s thought process is not as rigorous as philosophers like Kant and at times, the philosopher makes claims without leading the reader through the logical links.

 I recommend this book for readers interested in surveying Schopenhauer’s ideas before diving into The World as Will and Representation.

Narziss and Goldmund: The Spiritual Life and The Secular Life

Goldmund could not fit into the Mariabronn Monastery anymore than a square peg could fit into a round hole and soon left the cloister for the vagrant life. By sleeping in the woods, killing Viktor the thief, meeting the plague, studying under Meister Niklaus and romancing with Lydia and Julie, Lene and Agnes, he explored the sensual life as an artist. When Agnes rejected the old man that he was, he returned to the monastery to meet his friend and mentor Narziss before leaving the world.

Calw, Germany

On the other hand, at home in Mariabronn with the chestnut tree and knowing that his way differs from that of Goldmund, Narziss, isolated from the flesh’s pleasure and pain, lived out the monastic life, praying, meditating, searching for enlightenment through intellectual and ascetic disciplines. The way of the mystic was for Narziss as much as the way of the artist was for Goldmund.

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse, throughout his life, sought Goldmund’s artistic way¾ the emotional, prodigal, active, and sensual path¾ but ended up with Narziss’s mystical way¾ the intellectual, disciplined, contemplative, and ascetic path.

Buddenbrooks: The Saga of a Family

Thomas Mann's Novel on the Decline of a Family

Thomas Buddenbrook was a businessman, who followed in the family’s bourgeoisie pragmatism and achieved moderate success. But his brother Christian was the prodigal son, who squandered time and money in theater. And Thomas’s son Hanno, escaped harsh reality into the world of music. The conflict between the pragmatic and the ideal, reflected Thomas Mann’s struggles, and would surface again in The Magic Mountain.

Hamburg

The reader sees the family’s decline in Christian’s worsening pain, in Thomas’s gloom, in Hanno’s unhealthy teeth, and in the failed marriages of Tony, Thomas’s sister. Although Tony tried to leverage her and her daughter’s marriages to uplift the family status, their failures pointed toward the finale, where Christian was permanently institutionalize and Hanno died without children. Not only had the wealth dissipated, but also there was no heir.

Buddenbrooks is a monumental family saga.

Thomas Mann

Franz Kafka's The Trial

K was accused of an undisclosed crime, based on a hidden law, by an unreachable court. Trying to uncover his crime, he encountered gatekeepers dedicated to blocking his eyes from not only the crime but also the law. At first, shocked or tickled by such a nightmare, the reader soon realized that his biases, prejudices and presumptions are those of K and that to the court administrators, K was the lunatic whose delusion had clouded his eyes.

The Court (Photographer: Matt Wade)

How could we be guilty of violating a law we don’t know of? How could there be a crime without a law? Perhaps K was guilty of holding onto such biases as logic and causality or merely of existing. Whether he understood the law or accepted the sentence, he couldn’t avoid the punishment just as a boy couldn’t avoid growing up.

Locating the crime, the law or the court pales against our discovering the colored glasses with which we see the sea and the sky, the banknote and the meatloaf, Napoleon and Genghis Khan, or for that matter, the man or woman in the mirror.

Franz Kafka

We created natural laws to rein in protons and electrons; we created civil laws to rein in John and Jane; we created ecclesiastical canons to rein in God. Then we organized these absolute truths to rein in our fears, hopes and humanity. So once in a while we should enjoy the shock as from The Trial and realize that we still could create absolute truths when we’re bored texting or twittering.