A historically important novel of the impacts of war on the human heart. Seen it reduced to the blackest vile throughout its aftermath, the author’s alter ego Bardamu sets off deeper and further away from any sentiment with a hint of optimism. In a beautiful scene in the beginning of his “journey” he is touched by an unassuming soldier’s generosity who sends his wages to support his orphaned niece. Looking for a mark that makes this soldier an angel, Bardamu finds that there is no physical sign that differentiate between those who are extraordinary and despicable. Perhaps disheartened at this silent revelation, he is henceforth waiting for the moment of betrayal in others. I found it difficult to understand his disdain in every relationship, or his exasperation against human instinct to survive (at high moral cost), when he was too reduced to the same baseness. But then again, I have never experienced war, so who am I to say anything? Only that I am lucky not to know such things.
“I’d never felt so useless as I did amid all those bullets in the sunlight. A vast and universal mockery.”
“The sunsets in that African hell proved to be fabulous. They never missed. As tragic every time as a monumental murder of the sun!…It happened every day at exactly six o’clock. Then the night set in with all its monsters and its thousands and thousands of croaking toads.”
“Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotten viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, its sticking together that is difficult. Faeces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit: our frenzy to persist in our present state – that’s the unconscionable torture.”
JohannaAirth 
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