“…there was the educated Texan from Texas who looked like someone in Technicolor and felt, patriotically, that people of means—decent folk—should be given more votes than drifters, whores, criminals, degenerates, atheists and indecent folk—people without means… The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”

The people you serve with in the military aren’t really any different than the people you work with in any other place of employment. There are the over-achievers and the slackers, the creative thinkers and the conformists, the control freaks and the contrarians. At its core, the folks at USN and USMC are virtually indistinguishable from the folks at IBM and AT&T. The key dissimilarity is in the distribution of ineptitude. Unlike most civilian workplaces, incompetent individuals cannot be easily terminated and the competent individuals, in the presence of arduous ineptitude, cannot just quit and walk away.

The Peter Principal [Laurence J. Peter, 1969] theorizes that a competent person will be promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer competent and there they will stay. Thus complete equilibrium would be reached when all parties are promoted to their uniquely individual levels of incompetence—enter Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

“You see? You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You’re dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!”

Heller is a genius. He raises sophistry to an elegant art form. I don’t think I have ever encountered a novel which better illustrates the frustrating and degrading elements of military service. Sure it’s exaggerated and circular and often repetitive, but that is all part Heller’s panorama-of-paradox, his symphony-of-satire. This is complex brilliance put forth in simple paper & ink.

I'm really surprised that I gave this book 6 out of 12, as I have always vocally bemoaned how much I didn't enjoy it. The satire / humour I found a tad too infantile for me, so I guess what must have earned my rating, would be how the non-linear story line builds up a whole picture as you read the book? Whether I like it or not it is a modern classic, and I can see why; It's just not my cup of tea. 6 out of 12.

2007 read

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!

n  What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.n

This brilliant piece of absurdist humor, with its circular reasoning and twisted logic that lampoons not just war but society in general, hit America in the gut at exactly the right time, with the Baby Boomer generation coming of age and the Vietnam conflict about to seriously escalate. Set in the encampment of a small bomber group on a tiny Italian island during the waning years of WWII, the story bounces back and forth through a stupendously large cast of unforgettable characters, drunkenly ricocheting through time to tell the story of one man's attempt to survive. The humor abruptly vanishes from time to time which makes the serious parts even more impactful, not unlike this book's spiritual cousin, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr..

Heller whipsaws you back and forth between hilarity and horror, conveying not so much the stunning immorality as the utter absurdity of war. When Clevinger accuses Yossarian of displaying disloyal sentiments that give comfort to the enemy, Yossarian explains, "The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on. And don't you ever forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live." ... "But Clevinger did forget, and now he was dead."

Josep Heller'in "Muhakkak okunması gereken 100 kitap" içinde olması dikkatimi çekmişti. Açık konuşmak gerekirse "bugüne kadar yazılmış en iyi traji-komik, taşlama eser" denmesi fazla abartılı gelmişti. İlk 100 sayfada zorlandığımı, abartıya olan inancımın yükseldiğini hissettim. İşin içinde askeri bir takım yerler, nesneler, kişiler olması da beni biraz bunalttı fakat, fakat belli bir noktadan sonra yazarın ne demek istediğine, diline, anlatımına, kurgularına alışınca elimden düşüremez oldum. 618 sayfa nereye gitti anlamadım. Muhakkak yazar, ne yapmak istediği, neleri amaçladığı ve başardığını bilen başka dostlar olacaktır. Kısacası hem Joseph Heller hem de "Madde 22"yi tanımak keyifliydi. Memnunum.

A comic masterpiece set in Italy in WWII [4 stars, bumped up 1 star for making me laugh so much]




“If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.”―Robert Frost


“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you” -- Joseph Heller, Catch-22


The book starts out with the primary character being assigned to censor letters that are going to folks back home from the soldiers staying at a military hospital. He invents games to make the task more fun, such as "death to all modifiers" (out came all adjectives and adverbs on every letter; the results are funny).



Perhaps this book is so funny because it's comic relief against the absurdities and horrors of war and all its casualties. While I laughed out loud at many points, I must say that I found it much akin to a rich dessert, to be read in moderation. It can become clownish/buffoonish at times. Yet, it's the only book, besides A Confederacy of Dunces, that has consistently made me laugh, many times loudly.



If you haven't read this book, it's a nice departure from the serious and the sad of much literary fare. I know literary fare is more true to life. Obviously. Yet, from the Greeks to Shakespeare, we humans have shown a desperate need and a true appreciation for laughter: usually it comes in the form of comic plays, musicals and comedy/romantic-comedy films. But every once in a while you can gather it in the narrative form. This is one of those times.

My relationship with this book was somewhat quixotic. The first few chapters made me smile- in a bitter, ironic, wise-at-life sort of way of course. I loved the cleverness and deceptive punch-you-in-the-side way that Heller made his points, wrapped up in the whirling, hilariously awful world that he's created in depicting a tired, worn out unit towards the end of WWII in Italy. The choice of the main character in the bombardier Yossarian, a man who saw one too many horrors, is perfect. His questioning, questionable state of mind is perfect to depict all the contradictions, paradoxes, hidden, buried ideas that nobody wants to talk about during a war, and the sheer absurdism of the life soldiers lived, even in our "good war" of the 20th century. One understands Heller's rage at the blind torpor of a society that prefers to be lead and blame someone else for what happens. This particular unit is under special strain, as their commander orders them to fly more combat missions than any other unit, and then continually raises the number each time his men see a glimpse of their time to go home. The endless, senseless, everyday cruelty inflicted both on their surroundings and on each other slowly grinds the unit's minds and bodies into dust.

I almost wonder if when this was published, Heller was afraid that his audience would be inclined to put this book down as quickly as possible. It was one of my issues with the book that he seemed to throw out all his major questions, issues, wild emotions and ultimate points within the first few chapters, so that for awhile afterwards, it did all seem very monotonously repetitive, as we saw more and more ways of saying exactly the same thing in pretty near exactly the same formula. Perhaps absurdism is merely more effective in short form, as there was a period of the book where I was rolling my eyes and seeing shades of Catcher in the Rye's blind "Fuck the man!" screaming enough to only grudgingly read on. I understand that it may have been part of his point to illustrate that the absurdism of war does go on and on and on, but it did become something of a chore to read in the middle. Deceptively light comedy can't go on like that without at least hints at some deeper pathos that we don't have to assume is there. Also, the attitude that Heller is espousing, and the earnest questions he asks do feel somewhat dated. Not their message, of course. That is universal. Questioning authority, the value of life, the cost of war, the meaning of country and honor and duty, etc. But there is a phrasing that places it firmly in its time, which does seperate you from it a bit. I also found it all somewhat bleak and cold in tone, and not in a way that I wanted to spend time with at all. This middle section would be the reason that it took me so long to finish this book.

However. After I passed the halfway mark, my opinion improved once more. The character drawing, while still absurd enough to bring a wry smile to my face, was poignant enough that I started to get more involved. I needed to see layers. I needed to see the inner roiling turmoil, I needed to see the thoughts of these desperate men as they went about their tragically ridiculous lives, and see what it was that made them survive, or finally give up. It also helped that we saw more to Yossarian to make him a fully fledged person, rather than merely a conduit for the major points of the book. Perhaps I'm not saying this correctly, but while I can react critically to a character who is presented as a symbol, I can't be truly drawn to reading more about them unless I'm presented with more to see. In any case, I thought the last half intermittently, and particularly the last hundred and fifty pages or so were absolutely heartbreaking. In the end, Heller does make you both grieve and rejoice, and the story fulfills the promise of what I had hoped that it would be after its manically brilliant introduction.

All in all, it is a novel absolutely worth its "classic," name. It is worth reading to remind you of the many different perspectives that are available on an issue, to think critically about even concepts that you've never had to question before. Nothing is given. It is always worthwhile to be reminded of that.

The following is an example of how many conversations in this book took place.

Jen: I didn't like this book.
Nigel: Why didn't you like the book?
Jen: I did like the book.
Nigel: You just said you didn't like the book.
Jen: No I didn't.
Nigel: You're lying.
Jen: I don't believe in lying.
Nigel: So you never lie?
Jen: Oh yes, I lie all the time.
Nigel: You just said you don't believe in it.
Jen: I don't believe in it, Jen said as she ate a chocolate covered cotton ball.
Nigel: Well I liked the book.
Jen: Fabulous! I liked it too!
Nigel: What did you like about it?
Jen: Oh, I hated it.

I think Heller was showing how war is chaotic by not writing in a chronological order. You really have no idea in what order events are taking place. I think he was showing how war is ridiculous by writing conversations like the one above. I'm not sure if any of his goals were to annoy the living hell out of his readers, but he annoyed me. 460 pages of absurdness is too much for me. Most of the characters were very one-dimensional. I could only distinguish between people by their names. Most of the good guys all had the same personalities and the bad guys all had the same personalities except one character ate peanut brittle and another put crab apples in his cheeks. Other than that - same personalities. Maybe his goal was only to distinguish between the good, everyday guys and the evil, power-hungry men in charge. If so, he succeeded. I just wasn't thrilled after page 150 or so. There is some funny stuff in there. The chocolate-covered cotton balls will crack me up for life. There's some really sad stuff too. It's weird because every time someone died, I cared, even though I knew nothing about them, except what they ate or who their favorite whore was. I'm not sure how Heller pulled that off. Anyway, I would recommend it. It's just that the ridiculousness of it gets to the point where it's just, well, ridiculous, and beyond my personal tolerance level. I still appreciated it though.

Catch-22 reminds me a lot of those comedy/tragedy masks—you know the ones that are supposed to represent like, fine theater or something? Not that I’m comparing Catch-22 to some great Italian opera. All I’m saying is that the book oscillates cleverly between the absurdly humorous and the grievingly tragic.

So it starts off on the hilarious side. Here’s a bit that had me giggling aloud (rather embarrassingly, I might add, as I was surrounded by other people at the time):

n  The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him. They hurled lights in his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles into nerves to hear if he could feel.n  
n

Ha! That one still gets me. Unfortunately, the laugh-out-loudness has caused some people to think I’m crazy, but I suppose that’s the price one must pay for decent literature.

And then, like great Italian opera (really, I hadn’t meant to expound the parallel this far, but look—its happening!), you start itching for the intermission because your legs are falling asleep and you really need to take a leak. This is the point at which the humor starts to wear thin and seemingly unrelated events are haphazardly thrown around and you’re wondering if it’s going anywhere or if it’s just one absurd situation after another.

But finally, you settle in for Act III and discover that the seemingly unrelated events are actually part of an ingenious narrative structure that Heller has planned out from the beginning. Jokes that were set up earlier finally deliver their punch lines. Only it turns out the jokes aren’t funny anymore. In many ways, Heller’s writing is like that of Kurt Vonnegut, with similar subject matter wrapped up in threads of absurdity. But while Vonnegut speaks of the horrors of war, Heller’s issues are more with the horrors of the War Department: it is the red tape of bureaucracy that gets his goat. Well, and war, too, but mostly it’s the bureaucracy.

Anyway, this book is smart and well written. It would be difficult for me to come up with the name of another author who could write such perfectly contradictory sentences while still making so much sense.

n  
n  n  
n

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.

Hmmm. So, one of my Goodreads groups had WWII as a theme, and this was one of the books we read this month. I hadn’t read this before, so was keen to try it. It is a classic, after all, so I thought it would be interesting.

I downloaded this on Audible (the book itself is wonderfully read by Trevor White, who did much to make this outing bearable). My husband watched warily as I downloaded the title, said blankly, “you won’t like that,” and turned back to the snooker. This shows that, at least, he knows my tastes, as I really found this a struggle.

This is, of course, the story of Yossarian, and his squadron, who are doomed to fly never-ending missions in WWII. The number of missions keep increasing and, it seems, that Yossarian – who, understandably, feels that everyone is out to get him killed – will never manage to get sent home.

Without doubt, this is a clever satire. The enemy, as far as Yossarian is concerned, are his superior officers, all colluding in what he sees, all too clearly, as his future demise. There are a host of other characters, and it takes some time to work out who is who and what their place in the storyline is. Some of these characters are female, but –well – they are hardly part of the story.

I suppose you expect banter, and sexist talk, in a novel written in this period. The sort of behaviour, shrugged off as ‘locker room’ talk, not that long ago. Just about every female who ventures, warily, into the pages of this book is grabbed, groped, abused and insulted. Women are on the game, out for money, looking for sex and play no other role than to excite violent sexual talk, dreams and behaviour, in the men. Somehow, this goes well beyond casual sexism.

Had I found this book funny, then perhaps it would have helped, but I didn’t really. It could have just been me, but I found this an uncomfortable, unpleasant read.