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A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin
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From acclaimed novelist Mark Helprin, a lush, literary epic about love, beauty, and the world at war
Alessandro Giuliani, the young son of a prosperous Roman lawyer, enjoys an idyllic life full of privilege: he races horses across the country to the sea, he climbs mountains in the Alps, and, while a student of painting at the ancient university in Bologna, he falls in love. Then the Great War intervenes. Half a century later, in August of 1964, Alessandro, a white-haired professor, tall and proud, meets an illiterate young factory worker on the road. As they walk toward Monte Prato, a village seventy kilometers away, the old man—a soldier and a hero who became a prisoner and then a deserter, wandering in the hell that claimed Europe—tells him how he tragically lost one family and gained another. The boy, envying the richness and drama of Alessandro's experiences, realizes that this magnificent tale is not merely a story: it's a recapitulation of his life, his reckoning with mortality, and above all, a love song for his family.
- Sales Rank: #35040 in Books
- Brand: Helprin, Mark
- Published on: 2005-06-01
- Released on: 2005-06-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.58" w x 5.31" l, 1.79 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 880 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Energetic prose, poetic images of great intensity and an antic imagination combine in this gripping moral fable narrated by a septuagenarian irrevocably altered by WW I. This BOMC main selection was on PW 's hardcover bestseller list for eight weeks.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In summer 1964, a distinguished-looking gentleman in his seventies dismounts on principle from a streetcar that was to carry him from Rome to a distant village, instead accompanying on foot a boy denied a fare. As they walk, he tells the boy the story of his life. A young aesthete from a privileged Roman family, Alesandro Giuliani found his charmed existence shattered by the coming of World War I. The war led to an onerous tour of duty, inadvertent desertion, near-execution, forced labor, service high in the Italian Alps that took advantage of his (and Helprin's) skill at mountain climbing, capture by the enemy, and return home, dispossessed of most of his friends and family. Along the way, he gains, loses, and eventually rediscovers love. This rousingly good story of survival is all the more remarkable in the telling. The language is rich without cloying, complex yet luminous in Helprin's best style. In a number of thoughtful philosophical passages as engaging as any adventure story, Alesandro struggles to reconcile his appreciation of beauty and his religious faith with the horror around him. That he finally persuades us to believe in a "God without any hope, in a God of splendor and terror" is testimony to the indomitable human spirit. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/91.
-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"A rousing tale ... riotous energy and sustainedbrilliance ... Helprin lights his own way, in his ownsingular direction." -- --Time
"Extraordinary... a vast, ambitious, spiritually lusty, all-guzzling, all-encompassing novel" -- --The New York Times Book Review
"Intense, memorable ... magnificent ... a massive, soaring novel of ideas and ordeals." -- --Entertainment weekly
Most helpful customer reviews
161 of 169 people found the following review helpful.
Greatest American Novel of the Late 20th Century
By G P Padillo
One of the truly great works of American fiction. I will go so far to say as it is the finest work of fiction I've read written in the last half of the 20th century.
In "A Soldier of the Great War" Mark Helprin creates a story encompassing the whole of humanity weaving reality with a world of fantastic wonder. The unbelievable becomes real and what seems simple is only deceptively so and bends into the fascinatingly complex.
Helprin's style is enigmatic; his tale told in equal parts masculine bravado and contemplative delicacy. It is nothing short of astonishing.
Beginning with the preparation for a visit to his daughter, we follow the elderly Alessandro Giuliani on a seemingly routine bus journey. Things turn and a short journey turns into adventure when the old man comes to the aid of a teenager and he begins sharing his story and the lessons learned over a life rich and eventful. A life of youthful privilege gives way to the horrors of WWI and discoveries of love, loss and destiny.
Helprin elevates American fiction to that pantheon we reserve for storytellers the likes of Dickens, Cervantes, Dumas and Hesse. With this book (and to a certain degree "Winter's Tale")- he tightens the gap between great writers of "then" and "now" bringing contemporary fiction a true and rare respectability.
All adulation would, of course, mean nothing if this were receiving accolades solely on style and structure and ignoring the "readability" factor. On that front, I can only say this is a book I cannot imagine anyone not falling in love with and that, my friends, is the rarest book of all.
294 of 317 people found the following review helpful.
Helprin's richest work. Immerse yourself in its beauties.
By Bob Zeidler
Mark Helprin once offered this advice to an aspiring writer on how best to construct a work, to grab the attention of the reader (and here I can only paraphrase, as I have misplaced the source document): "Treat your story as if a stone thrown into a still pool, coming to rest at the bottom. Then dive in after it." The paraphrase is accurate enough for my purposes, and the message is clear: Know well the end of your journey before you begin it.
Little did I know then, when I had meandered across Helprin's advice, that it would be central to my ability to write my thoughts on "A Soldier of the Great War." For about the same length of time as that advice had been imprinted somewhere in my brain, I had also been faced with the daunting prospect of commenting on a thrice-read book, now bulging with scores of page markers as reminders to me of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even full pages, all worthy of comment. And, it seemed, the longer I put this task off, the more daunting it became.
Fortunately, this block was broken in the recent past, when I needed to give careful thought to a birthday gift for a friend. The gift couldn't appear to be too lavish, except in the riches of its contents. It needed to be something that would be new to this friend (and here I was at some risk), and at the same time something that would not soon - if ever - be forgotten. In the end, I decided to chance it with "A Soldier of the Great War," enclosing a brief note regarding what was in store. And the working through of that note was the curative that I needed for providing my comments on this Helprin work. So I threw my own stone into the pool and dove in after it.
"A Soldier of the Great War" flows over with great themes, the long arc of which is the relating of its protagonist's - Alessandro Giuliani's - life story, told in retrospect from Alessandro's memories of that life to a youth who accompanies him on a seemingly short journey from Rome to a near-distant village. And, following his own advice regarding the stone thrown in the pool, Helprin's lyrical, singing prose begins with the story's first paragraph, drawing the reader, too, to dive in, and doesn't let up until the very last page (where it then lingers for a very long while).
The overarching themes are classic: love and war; of love discovered, then lost, then found once again; of the blunt impersonality and the lunacy of war. They - and others - are all juxtaposed with typical Helprinian brilliance. There are maniacally funny set-pieces, interwoven so seamlessly into the narrative that one is not aware at first of Helprin's skill with the set-piece device as one is drawn in. (These include an excursion to the plains of Eastern Hungary that is one of the most remarkable of such pieces ever written.) There are passages of heartrending grief quite beyond one's ability to deal with them. And the story teems with characters both bigger than life and smaller and meaner than dirt.
But, at its core, "A Soldier of the Great War" is a story about love and beauty and the permutations one can make of those two words. And it is for this reason that I chose it. If you're like me, it will take you forever and a day to read it, as you find yourself re-reading - often several times, and on occasion out-loud just to hear what Helprin's words sound like - passage after passage after soaring passage.
This book is, also, everything that has already been written about it. Like Helprin's other major works, it has autobiographical content of both experience and opinion interspersed throughout. (One need not be aware of this before the fact; it is inessential to the story.) The story is indeed a classic Bildungsroman - a "novel of formation" that traces Alessandro Giuliani's growth in spirit over his life - and one of the very best of its genre. There is a certain convenience that, at least alphabetically, Helprin fits comfortably between Heller and Hemingway. But use this convenience wisely, as when browsing under "Helprin" in a bookstore: This story is every bit the equal of "Catch 22" in its often manic depiction of the lunacy of war, but is far more lyrical; a love song where Heller's work clearly is not. And, if "A Farewell to Arms" captured the Great War from Hemingway's uniquely American perspective, Helprin, by opting for an Italian protagonist, finds a universality that eludes Hemingway, and with prose that a century hence will continue to sing, unlike Hemingway's, which already seems stilted by comparison.
Finally, I am unsure as to whether I envy those who, like my friend, are experiencing this work for the first time (but I think that I do). Newcomers likely will be torn between lingering on each page and turning to the next, as the story races to its astonishing, yet in hindsight, perfectly-crafted and satisfying end: Helprin's stone indeed has landed in the deepest part of his pool. For re-readers like me, it matters not that one knows in advance how the story ends; there is a distinct pleasure to be derived from a lingering journey that is its own reward.
So, at long last, and not without solemnity, I can carefully remove those scores of page markers, needing them no longer. And thus I begin my fourth traversal of this work, this time with a sixth sense that a guiding force will keep my friend and me on the same page. While there are factors which make it an uncertain thing that we will read these pages aloud, perhaps in my meanderings I will find evidence elsewhere that this gift, like Helprin's stone, has come to rest at the right place.
Bob Zeidler
44 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
Rousing adventures, romance amid war's horrors
By Tim Smith
I'd read many of Helprin's editorials in the Wall Street Journal and was impressed with the literary skill he exhibited. So, when I ran across this book I thought I would give it a try. I really didn't know what to expect, although I did know it had had some glowing reviews. I read about thirty of the previous reviews here and nearly all of them contain valuable insights, including those mentioning the book's flaws. However, none of the reviews I read explicitly mentioned the fact that this is one of the better anti-war books written this century. It is best because of its optimism. Helprin describes, vividly, how war degrades or destroys all that is beautiful and lovely in our world: idyllic childhoods, family relationships, precious traditions, neighborhoods, society and its mores, love and romance, religious sensibilities, art - even the seemingly impregnable mountains are violated. Yet, despite numerous horrific experiences, Alessandro is saved in the end because he never lost his appreciation for "beautiful things", symbolized throughout the book by Giorgio's painting. There is much humor in this book. Some of it is bawdy. There are also many scenes of heart-wrenching sadness and exhilarating joy. However, there are sections that drag on too long, and after at least one of Alessandro's lucky breaks I found myself rolling my eyes and thinking, "Oh, brother." Despite these flaws, Mark Helprin is a gifted writer who has the rare ability to make you completely lose yourself while reading his work. Highly recommended!
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