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Jane Doe -> RE: The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer (2/9/2004 4:07:28 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: degen
My impression of the book--if it is authentic--is that Sajer was a confused but lucky grunt. However, I thought hiis writings on various battles were fairly vague and that someone who survived those conflicts could have provided more specific details. The romance he had also seem out of place for this story, much like the romance in the movie Enemy at the Gates. Those two problems were what raised doubts in my mind.
With that said, I did enjoy the books for similar reasons as Jane Doe, as I get tired of reading the accounts of where this corps went, the enemy units it encounted, etc. Those officer accounts can get monotonous after 200 pages or so. The individual viewpoints of soldiers tend to be more gripping.
Anyway, my two cents worth...
In fact, one thing that made me think it was authentic was the way it was written. I don't know about the english version, but my guess is that the quality of the language used in the english translation would not reflect the "poor" quality of the writing found in the original french version. I mean, rarely one sentence would get longer than one line... and this is REALLY rare in french. This is not what i would call a professional writing compared to others' work of the kind of Romain Gary (Émile Ajar) or even other less blessed writers. What I try to say is that his book, even if it's a blast to read, is a sketchy reading from start to finish.
And I think Kennedy Jr (in the debate - the other one too i think) doesn't even understand french.
And anyway, what would it be like if he was to being less vague about details... :
"And then we heard the sound of the high-pitched sound of a russian 120mm mortar round falling on our position, that when blasting, creates craters 5,5 meters wide and 2,7 meters deep and projects (do the math here) cubic meters of ground 14,4 meters into the air. They were made in the newly russian-liberated kharkov's Ivanovskaya Kharkoyivskiyi petardovskaya factory. So with 1.24 seconds time of reaction, we all jumped into our freshly-dug individual hole that were "approximately" 22cm deep, with a width of 74 by a lenght of 126cm, which means that I had to lay on my shoulders in a foetal position looking at my camo pants that was a combination of dark-olive, moon-black and humus-brown, though my pants zipper's color was gold instead of silver, the true sign of an elite formation in the werhmacht of 43! ... blah blah blah
Palpitant n'est-ce pas ?
PS Je divague.[8|]
PPS I'm realising just how bad my english really is when i want to make up stories trying to use figures of speech like irony, and such, so when i look at it, it doesn't even sound like what i had in mind... so please, if you don't find this funny, at least keep in mind that what I had in mind was indeed funny or even funnier.[:o][8|][;)]
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