War

May 26, 2008
Screenwriter, producer and author of Famine
, Komarnicki delivers a maudlin dystopian war novel. The narrator, referred to as “-----”, joins a secret government military group and awaits orders in a hotel with no television, unlimited alcohol and an unrecognizable war-torn city outside. The monotony is briefly broken by Mc., a bawdy storyteller who returns from a mission in bad shape. The protagonist is soon dispatched into the war zone, and after his foray into chaos, he returns to find his comrades dead and the hotel a bombed-out wreck. Putting together the clues after finding Mc.'s body missing and a suspicious quantity of explosives absent from the hotel safe, the protagonist concludes that Mc. bombed the hotel, and begins searching him out while looking for clues about the enemy and any indication of where he is. But because all identifying characteristics from the setting and characters have been stripped, there's too much pressure on the narrator's bombastic prose and sentimental flashbacks, and they aren't strong enough to carry the novel.

July 15, 2008
A nameless and alienated young man is forcibly conscripted into the military and sent to fight a war being waged in an unknown country for unexplained reasons against an unseen and uncertain enemy. Sent out alone from the hotel where his unit is barracked, he is told simply to engage the enemies wherever he finds them. Thus begins his wanderings across an existentially devastated landscape in search of the enemy, other members of his unit, and, somewhat unexpectedly, himself. Scenes from his boyhood and failed marriage arise with hallucinatory power throughout his wandering, until it becomes clear that the war is as much a psychodrama as a physical battle. While the protagonist could have easily been little more than an existential cliché, and the story line, with its occasional parallels to Iraq, just veiled political commentary, the book's psychological turn gives it substance and dimension. The striking images, rising like flowers from the rubble, lend a surprising freshness. From the author of "Famine"; recommended for larger public libraries.Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.