posted
After all the films, albums, books and comics that get recommended in this forum, I thought it might be nice to let people know what we think of the stuff they tricked us into spending our money on! So I’ve put together something about Legion of the Damned, by Sven Hassel, an author Dang’s been plugging relentlessly, and who’s just had four of his novels re-released in the UK. Maybe you’d like to do something similar! Or, just say something about war fiction, or maybe mention a way in which Dang’s made your life better/ much much worse!
Legion of the Damned
“Let us promise each other that those of us, or the one of us, who escapes alive from this will write a book about this stinking mess in which we are taking part. It must be a book that will be one in the eye for the whole filthy military gang, no matter whether German, Russian, American or what.”
Legion of the Damned, then, is Sven Hassel’s first crack at giving that filthy military gang their shot in the eye, with Sven joining the platoon of soldiers eager to make good on the possibility that the pen is mightier than the anti-tank mine.
Such war fiction undertakes a nearly impossible task: attempting to rend language into such twisted shapes as to portray the carnage of war to audience. It’s a world few of the readers will have experienced, and you can guarantee they’ll have almost no frame of reference to. What images, what events in my life can Sven refer to in order to illustrate the experience of fighting the Red Army on the frozen steppe? About the craziest thing I ever saw was a bouncer beating up a guy in a nightclub to the sound of No Doubt’s About A Girl, in eerie strobe lit slow motion. Was war as crazy as that? “Yeah”. Wow.
So it is that such books as Legion of the Damned are littered with events that are “unspeakable”, and “indescribable”. Like All Quiet on the Western Front before it, the book sometimes has to let the silence do the talking. Language just isn’t up to the job of describing war. Whatever could be, except war itself? Sven Hassel seems well aware of these problems, frequently appealing for leniency as he sets about describing these things that defy description. “What I have to tell is so tragic,” he writes, “even now all these years afterwards, I am sometimes so oppressed by it that I feel that I have the right to ask for your help I have failed from your own vocabulary”.
What, then, makes Hassel special? He’s not the first former soldier to write a book about war being rubbish and goddamit, at least Remarque didn’t have to ask me to do half the work for him. Why was Hassel until recently regarded as one of the best authors not published in UK?
For one thing, it’s the bile spouting craziness that runs through this awesome book. Sven hates Nazi Germany, the country for whom he went to war. He hated them right from the start. I mean, not just in the way everyone hates them; but in a serious bug-eyed screaming with disgust kind of way. The book bulges with contempt, and the prose seems as though it’s struggling to contain Sven’s endless scorn. You know how you hate Richard Madely? Well. This is much worse.
The effect is intoxicating, though. For whatever you may have heard about Hassel’s graphic accounts of combat, the first half of the book contains little fighting. Instead it’s a series mistreatments, ineptitudes, absurdities and indignities at the hands of the Fuhrer’s fighting force. The narrator is a broken, battered man pushed to the edge of human endurance before he even so much as gets a sniff of the Red Army.
Oddly enough, once he hits the front lines the book brightens up a bit, and its here that the novel really hits its stride. If he falls short at describing war, he more than makes up for it when it comes to describing the men who fought in the war. His fellow soldiers are described with an affection so formidable it easily matches up to the energy of his tirades against Hitler and his SS. I can’t think of another book that champions friendship so fiercely, and with such with such enthusiasm. It’s the sense that the book isn’t just “one in the eye” for the military filth, it’s a genuine, earnest attempt at honouring the memories of those the author fought with. Not just with, actually. Against, too. Some of the strongest sections detail the bonds shared between the opposing sides, best of which is an utterly absurd section dealing with the lengths they went to not to have to fight each other.
“”It transpired that there was a regular agreement that the Russians fired off a few shells every day between four o’ clock and five thirty, while we fired ours from three o clock and four thirty., each shell dropping nively into no man’s land where it did no-body any harm. That satisfied the generals. When there was any shooting with machine guns or small arms, they were naturally fired up into the air. If the Russians sent up a four starred red light, it meant there was a staff officer inspecting them and that for the sake of appearances they would have to do a little shooting with automatics. We had all sorts of signals that helped make life very pleasant for everyone.” Maybe I was wrong and Legion of the Damned could relate itself to my life: They have elaborate systems for bunking off work, too!
Such is the overpowering affect of this camaraderie that when the inevitable casualties start coming in, it feels like a punch in the gut. You want funny Sven back. You want the bits where they stole chickens and nobbed nurses. It’s fucked, because you know you’re reading about real people.
We come now to the crowning glory of the book, and that’s Sven’s unflinching candour. He’s not shy about admitting his own part in these atrocities, gunning down a man just to prove that he could shoot a particularly hard to hit Russian (“A point of honour. How could I? How could I kill a man for the sake of my pride”). It all adds to the powerful honesty, and the sense of truth that brings gives the book its roaring vitality and raw veracity.
It’s a weird feeling reading this new edition, republished in the UK after all this time in a cheap paperback edition with a lurid and inappropriate cover. It draws attention to what hasn’t been said, the soldiers who never had someone like Sven Hassel to write them well. It’ Its absence from UK bookstores almost made the characters own tragic fears coem true: “When you write our book,” said Porta, screwing his flute back together, “give all the girls my kind regards. There won’t be a soul who’ll bother to read it, for you can’t offer the public books that aren’t about little Miss Switchboard and the boss’s stalwart son in a double room. Or she’s the nurse and he the head surgeon. At any rate none of the characters can be lousy. As I said, you’ll never get rich off our book. People just don’t care.”
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posted
Thorn, to say that I've just let out an enormous sigh of relief would be to show a pitiful ignorance of the word ginormous.
I presume the general perception of Sven Hassel comes from a glance at the book covers which appear to have been carefully crafted to totally misrepresent the book's actual contents. In fact, here's what Catch 22 might look like given the same treatment:
If you fancy reading more by any chance, the next two books are Wheels Of Terror and Comrades Of War which actually run together in sequence unlike the rest of the series. I've usually got spare copies if you want to save Amazocash.
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The covers are what has always put me off Hassel's stuff in the past. Generally featuring some gurning, gritted toothed Stormtrooper firing his machine gun across a lurid WWII battlescape, they are the sort of thing I associate with the more extreme end of the real ale community.
Might have to give his stuff a bash now.
[ 01.09.2004, 04:50: Message edited by: Boy Racer ]
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posted
Well, yeah. As Dang says the covers are absurdly mis-representative, seeming to suggest nothing more than a rubbishy blood splattered boys own adventure, with Nazi sympathies.
I especially like the SS font in Hassel. I mean... why?
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: I especially like the SS font in Hassel. I mean... why?
This has been raged over by his fans for many years. They introduced the squared off haSSel in the 70s, but even then it wasn't actual SS runes. The latest books go that bit further. The weird thing is that in an email "interview" we did with the author in 1999 he said he now had control over the cover designs and that this wouldn't happen again. Senile old twit.
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posted
Bamba and Astro banging on about the joy of Lamb rekindled the vague memory of liking a song of theirs in 6th form, but never getting round to buying it.
Bamba then sent me 3 shiny discs of Lambchoons FOR FREE! And it was good.
As TV breakfast news makes me start the day IN RAGE, I like to listen to music in the 15-20 minutes between teeth-cleaning and leaving. However, being a nice, considerate housemate I listen to it at about Vol 8 on my new stereo (that was a quarter round the volume knob on my old stereo, if you recall). It's somewhat of a challenge to find albums that still sound good at radio volume as well as at Proper Loud. Lamb are one of the few bands who can do this. I also like the fact that I don't know the name of any of the songs.
Books:
Well done to kovacs for discovering, and others for enthusing about China Mieville, although I was a bit late to that party. The total of fantasy authors outside of Tolkien that I rate has now doubled!
I was distinctly underwhelmed by Ben-biggedup Atomised. It was allright, like, but not particularly special or memorable to me. The Ben-approved and brilliant War Against Cliche moves him back up in the RespeckRatings though.
Also Black Mask's The Killer Inside Me was just about worthy of being mentioned so often.
I think Thorn's Louche-crush will be severely tested by her response to his David Lodge recommendation; I'm sure we are all nervously awaiting that outcome.
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quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poetess: The Joy of Lamb
Alpine breeze, pure rainwater and subtropical sunshine rain down upon green grass and rich clover pastures. Sheep are free range in this mystical land and are in no need of hormones or steroids.
It is not surprising once you taste New Zealand lamb to understand that a quality premium product begins with the foundations that nature intended. We are proud to stand behind these attributes and offer you a quality array of lamb and related protein products year round, unsurpassed in taste and tenderness.
posted
AMP introduced me to "Spaced" and I absolutely love her for it.
Darryn has introduced me to lots of things (including the missus but that is not really the topic here is it) - Billy Bragg, although I knew of, I was at the last minute invited along to a gig which I much enjoyed, and kindled a liking for someone I already was aware.
However dude - scissor sisters are BAD.
I have taken note of a lot of peoples musical recommendations and given them a listen - Thank Thorn for SYL and sorry but I forget who for the PJ Harvey/Bjork Duet which left me cold, and I am now tracking down some more of her stuff.
posted
I thought black n white was supposed to be flattering.
Also, MNIJ gets minus 33 RespeckPoints for dirgesome The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, which adds to the minuspoints he gets anyway for being an Irish.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: I'm glad you liked that. My respect rating for Bambi never really recovered after he described SYL as 'nothing special'.
The album I have seems to be some kind of live version (I'm not big on live albums in general, especially not for a band I've never heard before) and I do keep meaning to track down the studio version and give it a listen because I am genuinely disturbed that you could be so wrong in your musical opinions.
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Octavia
I hate Valentine's Day. Stupid commercialised crap
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quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poetess: Also, MNIJ gets minus 33 RespeckPoints for dirgesome The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, which adds to the minuspoints he gets anyway for being an Irish.
YES! I have been trying to remember the name of the awful thing I struggled to get halfway through while in desperate nothing-else-to-read straits earlier in the summer, and THAT was IT. Thank you! 'Tain't often I give up on a book in a hurling-it-at-the-wall cry of why the fcuk bother - but that was one. The other of recent plaster-damage was Sarah Bradford's appallingly written biog of Jackie Kennedy Onassis Bouvier or whatever her million surnames were.
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quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poetess: I was distinctly underwhelmed by Ben-biggedup Atomised. It was allright, like, but not particularly special or memorable to me.
I finished Atomised on the way back from Amsterdam last night and I thought it was a mighty powerful and incredibly memorable piece of work. I also appreciated Ben's 'warning' a year or so ago about how its dim view of humanity is capable of insidiously seeping into your brain and sending you into a mild depression. The whole thing was remarkable, crackling with ideas and weightily intellectual. I liked it!
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: I finished Atomised on the way back from Amsterdam last night
Dude you kept that quiet! Mind you wasn't much good as I was not there either (%#^&@ Brussels...)
But next time give us a nod and I will throw a sickie if you fancy a beer. And I promise we will keep you away from the scary man again (no not Darryn..)
posted
It was a work trip, so I didn't have much time for socialising - but I did leave a message for you and Darryn behind the bar at the Black and White. I was a bit smashed, though, so I don't know what it says.
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posted
tad williams otherland quotrology is good. im reading another book of his and it is poor though. war of the wall flowers or something.
i just read pattern recognition by william gibson and i didnt like it. dude wheres where my country was the same as the other book i read by moore , so it was just like him spittling into my face for a day.
posted
I didn't like Pattern Recognition either, but I don't remember anyone recommending it -- Fifichan started a thread asking for help interviewing Gibson, but I would have bought it anyway.
I have been listening to the Delays thanks to Bailey's recommendation, and recently her shipping of a burned copy in a circular, translucent yellow sleeve that gives me almost as much pleasure as the album. When the Delays are good they sound to me like Lush but with a man singing.
quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poetess: Also, MNIJ gets minus 33 RespeckPoints for dirgesome The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, which adds to the minuspoints he gets anyway for being an Irish.
quote:Originally posted by Octavia: YES! I have been trying to remember the name of the awful thing I struggled to get halfway through while in desperate nothing-else-to-read straits earlier in the summer, and THAT was IT. Thank you! 'Tain't often I give up on a book in a hurling-it-at-the-wall cry of why the fcuk bother - but that was one.
I am surprised and saddened that 'THIALH' failed to capture the forum, and as a result killed the book club.
I genuinely found it touching, thoughtful and tragic.
I'll console myself with the memory of Michael Hughes cleaning out ponytailed whinger Robbie Savage.
Beautiful.
[ 09.09.2004, 14:34: Message edited by: My Name Is Joe ]
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posted
Also, very cool review Thorn, if I can overcome the 'skinhead and Sven Hassel, you must be a Nazi' stares of the large breasted boho girl in Waterstones, I'll buy it.
What is this 'The Tain' Gemini speaks of, is it another New Crobuzon book?
Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
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I considered lying about liking Paul Auster's excellent New York Trilogy, as recommedned by the estimable Bandy, on the principle that he vaguely promised me yer'll love it or yer money back!. But I get the feeling that getting money out of Bandy would be akin to extracting ORH positive from grantite. Just my supposition. Anyway. New York Trilogy was beautifully, chillingly mesmeric, so merci Bandy.
Carter Beats the Devil was also brilliant, but in a thoroughly different manner. One of those books where one is rooting so hard for the protagonists all the way through that closure leaves one with a warm happy glow of empathetc satisfaction. I loved it's quirky action moments and the marvelous economic character studies.
David Lodge writes some of the best prose I've come across. Spins out description until you're suspended into his world and slowed down to a kind genteel meander. Not as sure about some of the plot devices and the entertaining but too neat closures. Perhaps I was expecting something different.
Next I am going to try some of Fionnula's recommendations, and if anyone knows of any good books about the Crimea (war in/effect on) please let me know. I'm struggling with a rather dry naval history at the moment and keep forgtetting which admiral is which and being bamboozled by paragraphs of description of 1850s weaponry.
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quote:Originally posted by Louche: Next I am going to try some of Fionnula's recommendations, and if anyone knows of any good books about the Crimea (war in/effect on) please let me know. I'm struggling with a rather dry naval history at the moment and keep forgtetting which admiral is which and being bamboozled by paragraphs of description of 1850s weaponry.
Try some of Tolstoy's short stories based on his experiences of fighting in the Crimea (eg. Sebastopol Sketches); from what I recall, the moments of eerie calm, humour and bickering that punctuate the brief moments of full-on war horror feel vivid and truthful - like the finest journalism (I'd compare it favourably with Homage-era Orwell).
Anyway. Good stuff. People should read more C19 Russian authors rather than twatting around with callow London novels by callow Londoners on 3 for 2 at Borders.
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quote:Originally posted by ben: Anyway. Good stuff. People should read more C19 Russian authors rather than twatting around with callow London novels by callow Londoners on 3 for 2 at Borders.
Good point - just take a look at all the books on this thread. At first glance it appears that a total of none (0) are set in London, and that Ben's misfired on doing his twattish culturally superior thing again, just days after the last debacle. However, look again and you realise that on second glance, your first glance was correct.
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posted
I was rather stung and shamed when reading Richard Hoggart's How We Live Now (whose prose I "hear" inwardly as though BEN was speaking...a compliment to them both!) to realise that I was unfamiliar with most of Hoggart's literary "touchstones" (p.87). He proposes that good novels broaden our experience of the human condition, give us a sense of something wider, alive, beyond our everyday horizons, raise our line of vision &c... quite old-fashioned and romantic but invigorating for that, like a stocky, passionate old man taking you out to his field at dawn and urging "dig, boy! dig into that fresh soil with yer bare hands... really feel it, that's God's earth", then taking you to the beach at high tide and holding your shoulders as you catch in your face the cold spray thrown up by waves slapping the sea-wall.
Anyway his "touchstones" are lines or snatches from our interior library of lit and poetry, which come to us in fitting situations or perhaps just last thing at night. He suggests
"Dostoevsky's Grushenka remembering her one supreme act of human pity... his Aloysha waking in the chill... his Ivan Karamazov giving back to God his entrance ticket... Jane Austen's Emma on Box Hill... Melville's Queeqweg looking down into the whale nursery... George Eliot's Mrs Bulstrode facing her husband... Lawrence's Will and Anna Brangwen lost in rapturous love... or Cordelia responding with 'No cause, no cause'... Hardy's Tess baptising her baby... the distraught father of the dead Barazov... that is only one quick cull of prose memories."
Well I haven't read Lear for years, and apart from that, Emma is the only one of those books I've even touched. Should I be Shamed By My Poor English? And would I enjoy the novels he's referring to, or would they be a dutiful slog? (ie. how long are they, and how hard to understand.)
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: And would I enjoy the novels he's referring to, or would they be a dutiful slog? (ie. how long are they, and how hard to understand.)
Other than Lear, I think the only one of those I've read is Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and I wouldn't recommend that one to anyone. Hardy always seemed to me to be the crummiest of that batch of 19th Century authors with the possible exception of Thackeray. Anyway. Tess is a wearisome grind through misery and suffering, written primarily to make a fast buck and offering little in the way of emotional connection, humour or anything other than tiresome lucklessness. Particularly telling, the only thing anyone seems to find to discuss about it anymore is the idea that it's pointlessly sexist. I only read it because it was set in dorset, and even then, that fuck Hardy had changed all the place names, depriving me even of that frisson of recognition.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: Good point - just take a look at all the books on this thread. At first glance it appears that a total of none (0) are set in London, and that Ben's misfired on doing his twattish culturally superior thing again, just days after the last debacle. However, look again and you realise that on second glance, your first glance was correct.
I don't see why anyone's comments have to be restricted simply to what appears on this thread
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Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
Genuine thanks for the suggestion, Ben. I thoroughly enjoyed War and Peace, particularly the gruesome war-amputation-death-dismemberment-human condition parts.
Of Kovac's list I'm also restricted to Emma and Tess, and whilst I haven't read Lear I recall being enthralled by an RSC production in my youth. (Starring Robert Stephens, who dies lterally days after the final performance, which gave me an odd frisson). Tess was unmitigated, unbelievable, painful tripe, though. Both Tess and Jude the Obscure read like catalogues of destruction, and I could almost sense the author behind the text rubbing his hands in glee as he manufactured another improbable disaster for his beleagured protagonists.
I have found, though, that 'Classics' I've attacked with a sense more of obligation than enthusiasm, have usually given me more pleasure than I anticipated. War and Peace proved to be a rollicking read and Adam Bede, which I read for pleasure, was not unlike being supine in an autumnal garden having your brain caressed by falling leaves.
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"Dostoevsky's Grushenka remembering her one supreme act of human pity... his Aloysha waking in the chill... his Ivan Karamazov giving back to God his entrance ticket... Jane Austen's Emma on Box Hill... Melville's Queeqweg looking down into the whale nursery... George Eliot's Mrs Bulstrode facing her husband... Lawrence's Will and Anna Brangwen lost in rapturous love... or Cordelia responding with 'No cause, no cause'... Hardy's Tess baptising her baby... the distraught father of the dead Barazov... that is only one quick cull of prose memories."
...would I enjoy the novels he's referring to, or would they be a dutiful slog? (ie. how long are they, and how hard to understand.)
I found Crime and Punishment more memorable than The Brothers Karamazov; the murder scene is surely one of the most famed literary prose passages. Do I recall your saying, kovacs, that you don't read forren novels? Please to explain.
Moby Dick was pretty tedious to be honest, I wouldn't recommend it.
I suppose Middlemarch is desperately untrendy, being long and unevenly paced, and with the excellent TV adaptation somewhat eclipsed by Colin Firth in that nice clingy white shirt. I'd nominate the bit where Maggie Tulliver wakes up in Mill on the Floss and realises that she has eternally damned her soul and dirtied her reputation, as Eliot's most memorable passage though. Are there educated people around who still haven't read Middlemarch?
I find Lawrence a bit annoying. He has lots of pages that can easily be used as A-Level critical extracts though, like the famous one with the horse and the stupidly named sisters, in Women In Love. Lady Chatterley's Lover was amusing though, to try and imagine if the dialogue* could ever have sounded realistic.
*"tha's a great cnut" said medatively and fondly, or something similar. Dirty.
Are we going to have a favourite passages thread then?
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