I can't review this one properly, I listened to it on audiobook over about a month and never really felt involved with it. Each time I resumed reading it I can barely recall what happened when I last paused it. I find this to be a very hard book to engage with due to its non-linear and fragmented structure. Each chapter tends to be a little vignette about the absurd situations experienced by the soldiers of the 256th squadron on the island of Pianosa, and each chapter more often than not does not lead to the next chapter. While Yossarian is clearly the central character, the narrative point of view often switches to another character's who soon fades into the background or disappear from the book entirely. The frequent but temporary point of view switches make it hard for me to keep track of who all the numerous minor characters are.

On the positive side, the book is very cleverly written and often very funny, especially when it is focused on the absurdity of circular reasoning favored by the bureaucratic colonels and majors. I can see why this is considered a classic even though it is not particularly appealing to me on the whole. If I really wanted to review this book properly and fairly I would have to read it in print format over a week or so, but there is no point in doing that as I have absorbed enough of the content to know that it is not for me. I won't dissuade anybody from reading it because I don't really know who will enjoy this book and who won't. Catch-22 is known to be a humorous novel with serious undertones, but if you are thinking of reading it just for a quick laugh you may be in for a surprise (not necessarily in a good way).

I’m guilty of compulsively buying new releases and leaving those ‘Must Reads’ near the bottom of my shelves, so it’s thanks to Hulu for adapting this classic that made me pick it from the pile.
It might sound strange but I’d rather read the book, but also get the benefit of being able to talk to those that have watched the show...

The reader mainly follows bombardier Yossarian who’s currently serving for the U. S. Army Air Forces in Italy during the Second World War.
This unique story told in a non chronological third person narration pokes fun at the lunacy of War, with Heller himself having serving in Italy as a teenager in 1942 theirs a real sense of his experiences slightly exacerbated.

With the only real way of keeping tack of time passing through the novel by Colonel Cathcart’s constant raising of the required combat missions before a solider can return home.
Talk about moving the goalposts!

It’s such a complex but rewarding novel not least due to the amount of characters that are continually introduced.
Some are more interesting that others and we’d all have our favourites, there’s no point in trying to keep track of all of them.
Just like the environment they inhabit these people feel disposable, the reality is that most of them won’t make it to the end of the novel.

I don’t think this book will be for everyone, the humour is an acquired taste. I’m so glad that it clicked for me.
It’s definitely the type of book that you’ll know your love after 50 pages.

I really need to start delving into my pile more (not least because it’s starting to get out of hand) and I’ve got so many great novel awaiting for me to enjoy.

Worst book I've ever had the misfortune to pick up. My dad warned me that this book was lower on the evolution scale than a wet turd, but I thought I'd try it anyway. I hated this with every fibre in my body and with any luck the book will just crawl away and die.

The characters were obnoxious, moronic gits who I hoped would all die at the hands of Jason Vorhees very soon and there was no way I'd ever connect with that idiot who was meant to be our beloved hero. The dialogue was incomprehensible crap that was pointless and baffling, and you are left wondering what the hell they are gibbering about and why each scene was even written! What the hell is the purpose in talking complete shite page after page with no meaning or sense to it??? I couldn't see the point in the story at all and it was with a sense of joy that I threw the book into the bag marked 'charity shop'-then I found myself wondering what the poor charity shop had ever done to me to deserve receiving that book...How the hell this ever became a classic is a complete mystery to me. A classic piece of excrement perhaps.

I know plenty people love it and I'm happy for you, but it's just not for me I'm afraid!

NB edited 2021
Oh dear, not a nice review at all! I wrote this review ages ago and I admit I don't write such ugly reviews now. I'm more restrained and fair in being critical if I don't like something. I'm rarely so mean in reviews I write now!

Do I like Catch-22?
I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't.

Sorry to report that I am at odds with most readers' views of this iconic novel.
The foolishness of war. The absurdity of mission orders: yeah, Heller, I got it the first time! It's like someone who's told a joke but then keeps feeling the need to explain it, just as the laughter starts to subside.

Often cited as 'One of the top fifty books to read before you die': well, at about two-hundred pages too long, the repetitiousness almost caused me to die whilst reading it!
Sorry. : (

Everything about Catch-22 is absurd. Absurdist humor, absurd names, absurd conversations, absurd situations — all capture a world where all logic and meaning have disappeared, leaving only the horror of war and the banal inanity of bureaucracy which the mind refuses to process. All that remains is to laugh at absurdity to stave off screaming madness. That’s Catch-22 at its most basic.

The absurdities in this brilliant, satirical novel are hilarious. Heller pushed every scene, every conversation, to an over the top ridiculousness that still tracks with the more realistic situations that they stand in for. It is truly funny stuff. And directly bellow the surface of this humor lurks the tragedy. You will barely notice it at first, but it builds. By books end, almost all the characters you have been laughing at or with are tragically dead, and the goofy humor is no longer a shield from the fact that Catch-22 is a brutally tragic novel of the senselessness of war.

The structure of Catch-22 is a significant part of its brilliance. Its third person omniscient narration describes events from the point of view of many different characters, often repeating scenes from different angles. And it is non-chronological. It ends at the end, but doesn’t start at the beginning, and in between the chronology is all over the place. Separate storylines are out of sequence, and the timeline develops along with plot. While this unique structure is a dynamic part of the storytelling, it can prove challenging for some readers. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook versions, as having this novel read to you can be a wonderful aid to comprehension.

I have attempted to read this book on two separate occasions and I couldn't get beyond 100 pages either time. I do believe that this has more to do with me than the book and I plan on making a third attempt at some point in the future.

Currently it sits on my bookshelf and sometimes (when I have a few too many beers) we have a talk.

Me: Hi.
Catch-22: Oh, hi.
Me: How are you feeling?
Catch-22: I've been better.
Me: Don't be upset. It's not you. It's me.
Catch-22: I know that.
Me: My friends tell me I'm an idiot for ending our relationship.
Catch-22: I agree.
Me: I'm sure the reason I don't laugh or enjoy myself when I'm with you has more to do with my own flaws than with yours.
Catch-22: Of course. I'm flawless.
Me: I don't know if I would go that far.
Catch-22: Well, you've already admitted that it's your fault so I don't know if you're the best person to be judging whether or not I'm flawed.
Me: Hey, now! I didn't laugh once when I was with you.
Catch-22: I've been forced to sit on this bookshelf for years while you plop in front of the TV to laugh at Will Ferrell movies. I'll give you Anchorman but Step Brothers? Don't talk to me about what is or isn't funny.
Me: The sleepwalking scene in that movie is pure genius!
Catch-22: I rest my case.
Me: Ok, ok. You're right. I promise you that one day I'll be mature and enlightened enough to appreciate you and when that day comes, you and I will have some fun together.
Catch-22: I won't hold my breath.

n  n

A shiny new batch of awesome for my "all time favorite" shelf. It has been awhile since I’ve so throughly enjoyed reading a novel that has, at the same time, left me as intellectually awestruck as Joseph Heller’s classic sermon on the insanity of war.

What a sublime, literary feast. To prepare:

1. Start with a surrealistic, Kafkaesque worldview basted in chaos;

2. Knead in a plot reminiscent of Pynchon, taking particular care that the bizarre, placidly disjointed surface fully camouflages the powerfully nuanced, and deceptively focused central message;

3. Marinate the whole thing in a dark, hilarious satire that would have made Vonnegut beam like a proud papa.

4. Bake at 350, season with zesty prose, and serve.

Voila...a singular, absurdilarious serving of inspired genius that I can not recommend more highly.

This novel was so much more than I was expecting.

Despite its pervasive, laugh out loud humor, Heller’s story is the most horrifyingly effective depiction of the insanity of war that I’ve ever read**. I’m not referring to the evil and vile atrocities perpetrated in war that have been so extensively catalogued throughout the annals of literature. Rather, Heller's insight is geared to showing us the illogic of war, the out-of-control nihilism, and the chaotic, existential absurdity of it.

**Note: this observation is coming from someone who’s never been closer to war than the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, so season the above with grains of salt as necessary.

It's brilliant.

PLOT SUMMARY:

I think any attempt at a plot summary is doomed to inadequacy, so let me just briefly frame the story. The novel follows the exploits of the fictional 256th fighter squadron, stationed on the fictional island of Pianosa, during the height of WWII. With a large cast of characters and a non-chronological narrative that switches viewpoints constantly, Heller creates a delicious cauldron of madness and bureaucratic ineptitude that is just heaven to follow.

Our chief tour guide through the nuthouse is Captain John Yossarian, bomber pilot, whose main ambition in life is to “live forever or die in the attempt”. Yossarian’s life wish is so strong that he doesn’t even distinguish between the “enemy” and his superiors. As far as he's concerned, the enemy “is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.” To avoid the final finality of death, Yossarian concocts a series of ingenious (and hysterical) methods for staying alive, including poisoning his own squadron and redrawing a the combat map during the “Great Big Siege of Bologna” so as to alter the bombing target.

Despite his often less than moral shenanigans, Yossarian acts as the conscience of the story and helps to keep the rampant lunacy and chaos in context. His is the voice of indignity and righteous anger against the war and the cold, faceless bureaucracy that perpetrates it. Even against the God that allows it such horrors to exist in the first place.

n   ‘Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,’ Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. ‘There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?’
‘Pain?’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife pounced upon the word victoriously. ‘Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.’
‘And who created the dangers?’ Yossarian demanded ... ‘Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us?’n

THOUGHTS:

Loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it…and loved it.

The writing is brilliant, the characters are unique, engaging and memorable, and the story will scar you with wonder and awe. I can’t believe I hesitated so long to read this, and I intend to sit down with this many times in the years to come.

For those that have experienced this before, and for those who just want a stroll down memory lane, here are a few pearls that showcase this novel’s rather large package of absurd, satircal win.

**“Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.”

**"I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning."

**“Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.”

**“Colonel Cathcart was indefatigable that way, an industrious, intense, dedicated military tactician who calculated day and night in the service of himself.

And a personal favorite (all leading up to the very last line):

n  The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.n

Finally, I wanted to share one last piece of awesome with you. The following is the contents of the letter sent by the base commander to the wife of one of the main characters.

n  Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. [no spoiler]: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.n

Priceless…and what’s even funnier is that the set up of the joke occurs about 200 pages before.

Masterful.

6.0 stars. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!

Novel set during WWII on an American airbase in Southern Italy near to Rome. This is entirely incidental. This is a book written in the spirit of the The Iliad - life is war, and the nature of war is absurd - but we do it anyway, indeed we must, war must be absurd since we are absurd, and if this wasn't so we wouldn't fight each other. One might detect a hint of 1984, but this time with a smile, 'war is peace' and 'peace is war'. The war is in the background, it is the most important thing and the most irrelevant, the web of black marketering, now that is something that has meaning and consequence, but what is wheeling and dealing, profit and loss but war by another name? Another front of human mobilisation and struggle. Is the Major, major? We all will die, why worry if death comes from below while sitting in an absurd flying contraption, rather than after twenty or thirty years in the advertising business trying to persuade housewives to shift their preferred brand of cigarettes or to get unduly excited about soap powder. Heller only knew.

بعد از مدت ها، که به دنبال خوندن کتابی با تم ضد جنگ بودم، بالا موفق شدم و پیداش کردم :))
خسته و نا امید بودم از جستجو تا اینکه یه روز دیدم این کتاب توی لیست در حال ترجمه نشر چشمه اومده، انتظار تقریبا طولانی ای بود ولی ارزششو داشت :دی
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تبصره 22:
جنگ و پرواز با هواپیمای جنگی خطرناکه، اگه یک سرباز دیوونه باشه، می تونه بیاد و خودشو معرفی کنه و از ادامه جنگ مر��ص بشه، ولی شخصی که دیوونه باشه هیچوقت نمی فهمه که جنگ خطرناکه پس در واقع هیچوقت نمیاد که بدلیل دیوونگیش معافیت بخواد!

این تبصره ی 22 خیلی شکل های متفاوت تری داره و در کل کتاب خواننده رو همراهی می کنه! :))
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داستان کتاب حال و هوای خاصی داره و برعکس دوسنت اگزوپری که چهره ی خاکستری و تلخی از جنگ و پرواز و هواپیما نشون میده، جوزف هلر تونسته با سبک خاصی چهره ی جنگ و افسران جنگی و بزرگان جنگ های جهانی رو خیلی مسخره و البته تا حدودی کودن جلوه بده و در عین حال کتاب غیرمستقیم آثار مخرب جنگ رو بتونه به مخاطب نشون بده.
مترجم خیلی خوب کار کرده (متاسفانه سانسور دیده می شه در کتاب) و با توجه به چاپ اول بودن کتاب، اشتباهی درش نیست (البته من دید کارشناسی ندارم و یه خواننده ی معمولی هستم و بطورکلی گفتم)

ارزش کتاب خیلی بالاس و لقب شاهکار کاملا مناسبشه، من توضیحی از داستان کتاب نمی دم چون با خط خط کتاب می شه زندگی کرد. اکیدا و شدیدا توصیه می کنم بخونید این کتاب رو، حتی اگه از تم جنگ و ضد جنگ خوشتون نمی یاد!

Hmm, where to start with a book like this one. A book that is a third Kafka, a third Vonnegut, a third Pynchon and completely insane? For the first 200 or 250 pages, it is like a broken record or a movie loop with Sisyphus rolling that boulder up a hill in American WWII battle fatigues (and a flight suit and a Mae West life preserver sans the inflation module thanks the M&M Enterprises). Then, when the flak starts flying and the blood is splattered everywhere it is intense right up until the end.

It features Chaucerian cast of characters that would not be out of place in the German chaos of Gravity's Rainbow or The Tin Drum. A few examples:

Major Major Major Major: "He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whoever he could. He was a devout man whose pulpit was everywhere." But if you want a meeting with him, you'll have to wait until he has climbed out the window of his office and run down the gully.

Colonel Cathart: "a slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man of thirty-six who lumbered while we walked and wanted to be a general...[he was] impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his same age who were doing the same thing even better." Even if (or especially if) that meant raising the number of combat missions from 50 to 80 to impress General Peckham or General Dreedle or (gasp) General Scheisskopf (!!) whose wife was well, just a little promiscuous.

Then there is the Anabaptist chaplain who started to wonder about whether God exists and is tortured by his assistant, the sadistic Colonel Whitcomb and spends a lot of time wondering whether everything he sees is déjà vu, presque vu or jamais vu.

Also, the ill-fated young Nately and the equally ill-fated old man debating whether America was winning the war or whether Italy was since Italy has already survived more than two millennia more than the US even existed: "This sordid, vulturous, diabolical old man reminded [him] of his father because the two were nothing at all alike."

And then there is Yossarian, the protagonist. Perhaps the insane Captain (decorated for making a second bombing pass that killed Kraft) being the sanest person on the island of Pianosa despite being haunted by Snowden, the soldier in white, the dead man in his tent, persecuted and nearly killed by Nately's whore and all the death and absurdity around him. Yossarian is an everyman who is justifiably paranoid, but just a cog in the system and the only person that retains a sense of outrage at the senseless violence all around him.

This is the most anti-war book I believe I have ever read. It makes M*A*S*H look like a US Army recruiting poster in comparison. I was horrified by one-man syndicate M&M Enterprises of Milo Minderbender the cynic who deals with total impunity openly with both sides - even manning the anti-aircraft flak machines on the Italian coast shooting down US bombers and bombing his own squadron with loads of casualties. (This of course scarily parallels the Trump links with Putin and Russia and the massive amounts of money that Trump stands to make as POTUS.) Kid Simpson's slaughter was perhaps the most gruesome of them all, but the the scenes of terror and anarchy that Yossarian sees in Rome before being arrested for being there without a pass (leaving the murderous Aarfy smiling and careless as always) were chilling.

Do not come here seeking logic or sanity because in war, neither has any place - not in Catch-22 and I suppose in real life either. It reminded me of a cab driver I had once in New Orleans (true story) who was bragging to me about burying Iraquis in their trenches by rolling over them with tanks and bulldozers during the first Gulf War. When I mentioned that it was against the Geneva Convention to bury men alive, he shrugged in the rearview mirror and said "They told us that those rules didn't apply to us since this was just a conflict and not a war and besides, we were the US Army and not bound by some stupid European rules."

If, as I did, you struggle through the first 200 pages, the pace picks up - as does the violence - and you will find yourself cheering for Yossarian and racing to the end (if not, as Yossarian, to Sweden.)

I would give it 5 stars, but the first 200 pages are really torture to get through, so for lack of being able to give a 4.5, I rounded down to 4 stars. Regardless, I can clearly see, however, why this classic is held in such high esteem. May we never go through another war like this again. I can also see some of the inspiration for Alan Alda for creating M*A*S*H in the 70s and, reading Fire In the Lake about Vietnam, we learned absolutely nothing from the errors that Heller describes.

Reading the second Rick Atkinson book of The Liberation Trilogy about the Allied campaign in Italy. Every bit as brutal and chaotic as Heller portrayed it - particularly the brutal inch-by-inch campaign up from Salerno to Rome! Anzio was particularly horrendous. Curious fact: Roger Waters' father (the one he eulogizes in The Wall) died at Anzio.

Highly recommended as a piece of essential anti-war black humor.


Did anyone watch Clooney's adaptation on Hulu? Is it worthwhile? ??

Is it tragic, absurd, or funny?

WHO CARES!

This beats out almost every book that purports to be funny and I'm not particularly unfamiliar with funny books.

Catch-22 grabs you by the skinny hairs and shocks you into the most wonderful and horrible bureaucratic nightmare ever devised. It's not even the clarity that strikes you. It's not the convoluted insanity of a huge cast of truly unforgettable and brilliant characters as they stumble from one mismatched contradiction after another or as they game the system to truly amazing proportions. (Milo.) :)

It's the timing, the clever buildups, the sheer insanity of one damnable event after another and the realization that the only clear solution, the only way out of this trap, is...

No. Wait. That IS the realization. There is no way out.

We can put the book down, but the absurdities live on. Not just the absurdities inside the book, but in our own lives as we deal with one more piece of nonsense after another. There is no escape. None.

And yet, I kept laughing throughout this novel. This brilliant, brilliant novel.

I'm going out on a limb here to say it's in the upper 20 books of all time. Maybe higher. There's absolutely nothing about this book I didn't love. I'm gonna have to read this 4-5 times just for the sheer perverse pleasure of it.

Sure, some Italian whore might come at me with a steak knife or other piece of cutlery, but that's the cost of doing business with the military.

Totally amazing.

It's not often I say this about a novel, but I'm really going to miss these guys. Oh, and gals, Nurse Duckett, Luciana, and even Nately's whore. Alright, maybe not General Dreedle; although his ill-tempered rants were great, but the rest of them; and there are a lot of them, have been like a family the last few weeks. A BIG family. Yossarian, Nately, Orr, Milo, Dunbar, Dobbs, Snowden, Aarfy, Havermeyer, Appleby, Hungry Joe, Kraft, McWatt, Kid Sampson, Huple, all were like brothers. As for the uncles, well, lets just say there were quite a few! Can't remember the last time I read a book with so many characters. Even some of the minor ones felt like major ones to me. And speaking of major, what about Major Major Major Major! Ha, classic! I swear it's some of the names here I'm going to miss just as much as their personalities.

I'm not sure if this person had had a bang on the head or something, but I was told that this would read similar to Pynchon. No. It's nothing like reading Pynchon. Despite the fact that the narrative doesn't run in sequence, is madly eccentric and full of loony antics, and has loads of differing points of view, Catch-22 in comparison was a walk in the park, and I don't get the readers who just didn't get it. It's satire. Not Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I'll admit though, I wasn't so sure about this at first, but it was a novel that grew on me immensely once it settled down and you get used to the way Heller is going about his business. It's no doubt comical. Really comical. But all the way through beneath the surface of amusement I found, with all seriousness, that Heller was saying something outrageous and unforgivably so, about the stupidity of what war does, and and how the system of false values on which it is based truly fucks up our whole way of life. The horror he set out to expose wasn't confined to the bloody battlefield or the never-ending missions of dropping bombs but pervaded the complete labyrinthine fabric of establishment power. There is so much here that again reminds us of all that we have taken for granted in our world and should not. Also, although set during World-War-II, I can fully understand why Heller's novel went down so well with the Vietnam generation.

Catch-22 isn't a work of one or two massive incidents, but rather of so many memorable middle-sized and smaller ones. So many in fact, that even now not long having finished it, I've probably already forgotten half of them. One that will never be lost to me though is that ending. It was great. I was beaming. I truly was. It was the same sort of feeling I had at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when Chief throws the sink through the window and runs off. Sure, there were a few occasions when I wished that certain things had played out differently, but Catch-22 gave me so many pleasurable reading hours during what is for me the worst time of the year: made even worse due to you know what, that it has to be a five for me. I'm really starting to believe now that this is indeed a masterpiece.