All Quiet on the Western Front
By: Erich Maria Remarque / Narrated By: Frank Muller
Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
Exquisitely written with heartfelt narration. Absolutely devastating…
I remember reading All Quiet on the Western Front when I was a teenager, and I found it to be quite moving then. But it wasn’t until now, in my 50s with life experience and war fiction, histories, and memoirs galore, behind myself that I dusted off the audiobook (Which has been sitting ever so patiently in my Library) and pressed Play for this Veterans Day of 2019.
It was a Listen At One Sitting experience. I went without sleep. And food? Whazza?!? Certainly none of it was anywhere near as important as hearing this inCREDibly stunning work, what with its pure and raw poetry of phrase by Erich Maria Remarque, what with the sheer and quiet intensity of narration by Frank Muller. It’s at times lyrical, at times bawdily hilarious, at times, well. By the end? It’s flat-out devastating.
Paul (I won’t give his last name because yes, German, but no—he’s first and foremost Human) is 19-years old when he and his school chums enlist to fight in WWI. They’ve been sold a patriotic-filled bill of goods of the glory of war by older people who won’t be doing the fighting. And they join in training with zeal and good humor. Soon they find themselves fighting, and killing, for their very survival. And soon, they wonder if, though their hearts remain beating, they didn’t somehow die at some hell-soaked, soul-scarring moment sometime during war.
This is a global work, and Remarque, though he wrote this aaaaages ago, in a time when everyone thought it couldn’t happen again, and then we later went on to call the next World War, the Good War, wrote this as one human against inhumanity and insanity. He wrote to show how a generation of young men could be utterly destroyed by war and could survive only to feel unable to find their footing in a society too willing to turn its back on war, lost causes, alienated beyond belief.
The tragedy and genius of the work comes in that none of the battles are really named—This isn’t a battle by battle play-by-play. These are simply life, limb, sanity threatening melees where very little is gained and oh so very much is lost. The only thing that matters to these men, they think, is to get back home. But once home, there’s absolutely no way to convey what their lives were like, no way to come to terms with what they’ve done and with who they’ve become.
Once again, Frank Muller gives a brilliant and haunting performance. I’m unfamiliar with his work thus far, but I see that he’s done one of the versions of Moby Dick, plus he’s done some of the better Stephen King. I will most definitely be checking those books out later, and I’m sure he’ll be thunderously awesome.
By the time we get to the heartbreaking conclusion, we feel so much for Paul, for how he’s aged, how he feels so much he’s numb and accepting, that the book appears to end in the only manner possible. This is the road to a peaceful soul.
And once again, yet again?
Devastating.
Remember Veterans today. Look at them. See them.
Mark what they’ve endured.
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