|
|
Adult Books - Fiction - General Fiction
|  |   | 
Peace.
Bausch, Richard (author).
Apr. 2008. 192p. Knopf, hardcover, $19.95 (9780307268334).
REVIEW.
First published April 15, 2008 (Booklist).
How to fictionalize war? A novelist can take a panoramic perspective and write about generals and battles or focus on a single participant’s fear and courage. Bausch, a consummate and versatile short story writer and novelist, tells one soldier’s story in a war novel distilled to its chilling essence. The earth itself is an adversary as Corporal Robert Marson takes two men on a miserable recon mission in Italy at the bitter end of Word War II. The nervous Americans draft an old man they’re not sure they can trust as their guide. The rain is piercing, the hill they climb turns out to be a mountain, and it begins to snow. Someone is hunting them, shots ring out from the village below in ominously measured bursts, and it feels like the end of the world. Their awful travail is made worse by bigot Joyner’s needling of Asch, a Jew. Marson thinks of his sunny past and the baby daughter he’s never seen and tries to hold on to a sense of right and wrong. Bausch’s tale of one act in the immense blood-dark theater of military conflict is razor-sharp, sorrowfully poetic, and steeped in the wretched absurdity of war, the dream of peace. — Donna Seaman
| |
|
| Click here to find more books by this author |
| |
|
|
Features That Discuss This Work:
1. Notable Books : 2009
2. Top 10 Historical Fiction : 2009
|
|
|
 |
|