Wall, Watchtower and Pencil Stub

July 1, 2014
An examination of the seminal works of World War II, many of which opened eyes to truth by eyewitnesses.Civilians suffered most during WWII, by the millions, as professional translator Carpenter notes in this somewhat scattershot comparative study, from the first occupied Baltic states under the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, to the Battle of Britain and the bombing of cities, through the horrific stories of POW and concentration camps across Europe and Asia. Indeed, the events of the war "went counter to all previous notions of strategy, self-interest and concepts of human behavior," leaving victims in shock and disbelief and often unable to convince others what had actually happened. Carpenter moves through the war by picking works of poetry and prose, in a variety of languages, that best illustrate both the "magical thinking" of many writers early on-e.g., the English authors Anthony Powell and Elizabeth Bowen-and the absolute need to bear witness to brutality that nearly lacked the language to tell it-e.g., in Jankiel Wiernik's A Year in Treblinka. The war's themes of authoritarian deception and disguise provided the fodder for works by Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler and Varlam Shalamov ("Lend Lease"), to name a few, while other writers employed metaphors and tropes of flight, animals and angels as a way to express the horror. Underscoring all of these bracing accounts is the basic need to leave a trace of oneself behind as life became precarious and death loomed everywhere, as the anonymous author of The Far Side of the Moon described when the iron doors of a train were shut, dislodging tiny pieces of paper: "From the gratings fluttered down showers of white scraps, atoms of paper on which were written names and addresses, last messages begging not to be forgotten, broken sentences and prayers."Though erratically presented, this work of literary research should spur further study.

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October 15, 2014
Translator and comparative-literature scholar Carpenter examines a panoply of fiction and poetry from the WWII years in this somewhat rambling meditation on how contemporary narratives were shaped by the war. At its most basic level, this is a review of the various wartime hardships overcome by writers, including concrete obstacles like hunger, danger, censorship, and paper shortages. But its real focus is upon the more abstract challenges posed by the war. How did the experience of the war change the way writers understood themselves and the world around them? How can one wrap wordslet alone narrativearound experiences too surreal or too horrifying or simply too vast to be readily described? In addressing such questions, Carpenter notes contrasts: between military and civilian life, city and country, order and chaos, and the rhetoric of war and the real thing, up close. As Carpenter's emphasis is upon works written during the war (as opposed to postwar reflections), he is particularly fascinated by the seeming authenticity of perspectives expressed by those who do not yet know how the war will turn out. Although he makes some suggestions about how wartime narratives would define literature through the postwar period, this book's real strength is in what it suggests about our desire (and perhaps need) to bear witness to war's horrors.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)