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<\/i>, ranked #96 on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100<\/i> and part of the Bloomsbury 100, is a funny, sprawling, slow-reading, and deeply angry look at the pointlessness of war through the eyes of an anarchist soldier who’d be at home in Project Mayhem yet manages to put on a good face enough to keep himself out of harm’s way.<\/p>\nThe novel follows the exploits \u2013 although given how little he manages to accomplish, we might better call them inploits, or unploits \u2013 of the soldier named \u0160vejk (pronounced something like \u201cschwayk\u201d), who finds himself drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army at the dawn of World War I and acts with a single goal in mind, that of his own survival. Along the way, he’s passed from one half-wit superior officer to another, from power-mad lieutenants to drunken chaplains, gets lost (most likely on purpose) in Bohemia in a section ironically referred to as \u201c\u0160vejk’s anabasis,\u201d gets arrested and nearly hung, and always responds to inquiries by telling the absolute truth, embellished with a ridiculous anecdote of someone \u0160vejk knew in his hometown.<\/p>\n
The grand secret of \u0160vejk \u2013 the character and the novel \u2013 is that absurdity is the only viable strategy in the face of the absurdity of a higher authority. Faced with a war that makes survival unlikely, fought over a cause in which none of the fighters has a personal stake, \u0160vejk chooses to \u201cpretend to be an idiot,\u201d playing the part of a perfect innocent who relives what is, in essence, the same episode over and over and always escaping by disarming and\/or exasperating those who wish to send him to certain death on the front lines.<\/p>\n
If this sounds a lot like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22<\/a><\/i>, then you’ve got the idea. \u0160vejk is not a direct antecedent to Yossarian; the latter’s subversion is explicit, while the former works through simpler and more ostensibly innocent means, like taking a direct order a little too literally. Working as batman to the lieutenant he haunts for much of the book, \u0160vejk fulfills his master’s order for a dog by kidnapping one off the street, only to find that the dog’s owner is the lieutenant’s commanding officer, the insane Colonel Kraus, who peppers his harangues by asking his charges if they know what obvious words like \u201cwindow\u201d or \u201choe\u201d mean. Yossarian engages in more active efforts of sabotage \u2013 and has plenty of help from his fellow soldiers \u2013 whereas \u0160vejk is a solitary operative attempting not to end a futile war but only to get himself to the next sunrise without getting shot.<\/p>\n (I’ve struggled to find a definitive answer on whether \u0160vejk<\/i> was a direct influence on Catch-22<\/i>; Wikipedia \u2013 which is never wrong \u2013 states that it was, probably based on the claim by Czech writer Arno\u0161t Lustig that Heller told him he couldn’t have written his masterpiece if he hadn’t first read \u0160vejk<\/i>. That seems to be the only source for this assertion; this 2004 New York Times<\/i> review of a \u0160vejk play<\/a> states that Heller \u201c told various interviewers that C\u00e9line and Kafka were his most powerful influences and that \u0160vejk<\/i> was ”just a funny book,’\u201d while a Vanity Fair<\/a><\/i> article from August gives a non-\u0160vejk<\/i> origin story for Catch-22<\/i>. I could see a truth in between the two extremes, where Heller, having read the book, was influenced by it on a subconscious level, drawing inspiration from its hero’s response to the war’s absurdity but never returning to the earlier novel in his writing process or alluding to it directly in the text.)<\/p>\n
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<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"