DNF - ugh. the first one was ok. i was gonna go through the second and third because the trilogy is supposedly an important classic but i just really dont like it at all.

Probably just my mood, but I kinda lost momentum after the first volume of the trilogy and became a little bored in simply reading one damn thing after another happening to characters I haven't really come to know in any meaningful way. Again, I felt the mini-biographies (I'm sure there's a more respectful term for these sections) were often brilliant and provided sharp-edged insights (and a distinctive narrative voice) that I was looking for in the other stories. "Camera Eye" sections continue to confuse me, which I guess is part of their Joycean charm, but I don't feel that they add to the overall impact. I am perfectly willing to be convinced otherwise, however, (and/or to find myself in a more receptive mood) so I will be reading The Big Money (3rd and final volume of the trilogy). Maybe just not right away...

I hope this isn’t one of those trilogies where each book is a little worse than the one before it. Once again I have done the audible listening. And I did think that the second volume was a little less impressive than the first volume. Maybe that was because I had already gotten the point. I know the third volume and final volume of the trilogy is next in line.

I would have to say that this book is mostly about WW1. With a little bit of IWW thrown in. Most of the IWW was at the very end. But the most compelling story in this book was one of the fictional narratives about a romance between one of our main male characters and a somewhat fascinating woman from Texas. You kind of have to like her but he is a cad. But a cad who is like an awful lot of men in these books. He loves her and dumps her and she of course gets pregnant. Women in these books suffer dependably simply because they are women. They don’t always deserve it.

I seem to've developed a bad habit of reading series out of order. 1919 is the second volume of John Dos Passos's "USA" trilogy (the others are The 42nd Parallel and The Big Money). Dos Passos seems to have fallen out of favor; anyway, I don't see much in the way of references to him--maybe because his politics turned sour later in life?--and even E. L. Doctorow, in his introduction to this edition, comes across as ambivalent and uncertain even as he reminds readers that "USA" was proclaimed "a major achievement" by contemporary critiques. So what shall we make of 1919 today, without, I am sorry to say, the benefit of having read its compeers?

The writing is both beautiful and strange. Long, complex sentences slouch across the page, propped up by short pithy companions; plenty of mots justes, but simple and direct: "Freddy was in ecstasy about being in Paris, and the little children sailing boats in the ponds in the Tuileries gardens, and the helmets of the Garde Republicaine turned out to salute the King and Queen of the Belgians when they passed" (254), an example chosen at random. Interludes called "The Camera Eye" and "Newsreel" break up the sections devoted to one character with sentence fragments, headlines, snatches of songs, phrases in French or Italian. The characters are many, complicated and contradictory, all too human, and deeply conflicted about the war they just emerged from and the world that's forming. There's plenty of revolutionary talk but the action hides offstage; no street battles in Munich.

The book is ineffably sad. No one gets what he or she wants; people die purposely; and the loss is all framed by President Woodrow Wilson's hopeless efforts in the peace talks to impose his vision of a new world, secured by his League of Nations. The violence to come with the Red Scare in the US, which led to some of the worst police violence the nation ever saw, hangs over the future, adumbrated at the end by a narration of attacks on and murders of IWW organizers in Washington state.

1919 is a compelling read, clearly influenced by the Modernism bubbling around Dos Passos when he read (Fitzgerald, say) and the experimentalism of Joyce, Woolf, Proust. But while those writers are now in the pantheon, where is Dos Passos? Outside, looking in? As for me, I just don't know.

2nd Reading.

After the surprising novelty of The 42nd Parallel, 1919 offers a fuller portrait of John Dos Passos's "USA" experiment. I found this book something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, Dos Passos is a master of subverting traditional novelistic form, and his combination of approaches to telling the American story is highly fascinating. On the other hand, I found the novel to be quite dry at times, and Dos Passos is more successful in telling the story of a *particular* America than the story of the entire country. Nonetheless, this book still earned 4 stars for me primarily because of its inventiveness and attention to historical detail.

As I discussed in my review of The 42nd Parallel, Dos Passos freely transitions between several different narrative forms to tell his story: collages of contemporary newspaper clippings and song lyrics; biographical snapshots of great American figures; a first-person stream-of-conscious narrative from Dos Passos's own life; and intertwined third-person episodes recounting the lives of Americans from all walks of life. Each of these strategies on their own would be fascinating, but together they contribute substantially to Dos Passos's success in revealing a macroscopic story of America. In this book, we're mostly introduced to new principal characters, but Dos Passos does an excellent job linking characters' stories together and joining their lives in interesting ways. By the end of this book, the same overall narrative implicates nearly every character from the series so far, and this is deeply satisfying to the reader. Finally, I also greatly appreciated Dos Passos's careful historical reconstruction of personages such as J.P. Morgan and Woodrow Wilson. The history is accurate, if a little dated, and the characters truly feel like real people. Thus, in 1919 Dos Passos successfully retains all the elements of storytelling that made the 42nd Parallel so great.

However, I also had a couple notable issues reading this book. First, Dos Passos's narrative focus is ostensibly on the entire nation of America, but in reality his viewpoint is sharply limited. There's basically no discussion whatsoever of people of color or minorities in the book, apart from some slurs and a section about the Jewish Ben Compton. And even among White Americans, Dos Passos's story is near-exclusively focused on the labor movement and the war; these are valuable subjects, but they don't define the entirety of American culture, so neither should they define the entirety of a book like this. Second, and more importantly, this book is just a little dry sometimes. The writing quality and emotional intensity of the novel changes drastically from section to section -- some characters, like Daughter, prompted genuine emotional reflection on my end, while others simply left me a little bored. Perhaps this is because the book focused so much on history and experimentation, but even so, I found 1919 to be less engaging than The 42nd Parallel.

Despite its flaws, 1919 is an excellent experiment and a well-written book. It combines conventional narrative literature, stream-of-consciousness writing, history, and Marxist ideology into a single volume. This book may not fully depict America as a nation, but it does successfully portray Dos Passos's America. This is a valuable lens through which to view our history, and accordingly, I would recommend this book (and really the whole trilogy) to serious fans of American history or literature.

What a seriously strange book this was. Having received a copy of this book to listen to, I was somewhat dismayed to discover that it was the second book in a series. I absolutely abhor reading or listening to things out of order. However, I decided to start in on it without attempting book one, figuring that if I liked what I was hearing, I could run out and find book one and come back to 1919. The fact that I am reviewing this, having not reviewed the first book in the series should be rather telling.

1919 has zero plot. This is by design, but that does not endear it any more to me. The book is told in various sections: headlines/jingles, stories about regular depressing Americans, autobiographical segments (called Camera Eye) and biographies of famous Americans. Although that mixture of elements sounded really intriguing to me, it came of ass just a confusing jumble, something that I suspect may have been worse in audio format, especially with the headlines.

None of the segments interested me at all, except for some of the stories of regular folk, although those tended not to keep me enthralled either. The problem was that every one of them will destroy themselves with bad decisions, as you discover in the forward by E. L. Doctorow. So, basically, even if I did like someone, it was inevitable that I would come to hate them because they would act like an idiot. Argh!

I will give the narrator his props, because I think he did a pretty good job with this confusing mess of a book. He happily sang the songs in the headline bits and did a pretty good job differentiating the sections. I think he did mispronounce some of the Italian though.

This definitely was not a book for me. In theory, it sounded interesting, but the execution of the different sections and the pointlessness of the main people's stories just wore me down. Maybe it would have been better had I read the first book.

After reading The 42nd Parallel, I wasn't sure I would continue with the trilogy, but something made me want to see what happened with those characters. There's were a few tragedies in this book, but I still care about some of the characters. I'll probably read a few other books before getting to Book 3 of this trilogy...

And even though there are a lot of phonetic spellings because of characters with dialects or heavy accents, there are still a lot of typos in this book (drinking "run" instead of "rum", "he" instead of "her" or "the", "the" instead of "they") which is surprising in a professionally published classic book. Was this from the original typeset from 1932 that they didn't feel they should correct, or lousy proofreading from the modern publisher?

This is one of my dad’s books, otherwise, I wouldn’t have read the sequel to a book I didn’t like that much in the first place. The second book was a lot like the first, though I was more interested this time by how modern everything seemed in 1919, particularly with regards to sexual mores. (Assuming Dos Passos got that right, and I suspect he did.)

The second book of Dos Passos' "USA" trilogy is set right after World War I and continues the pattern of the first volume, The 42nd Parallel. Not much of a plot line, but rather a set of character sketches focusing on a variety of people. The sketches are mesmerizing and written in a way that the characters seem real and believable and even with the passage of close to a century, the reader can relate and believe in these people. Much like Thomas Wolfe, Dos Passos captured how real people think and behave even if it is not always eloquent.

The sketches are interspaced with what Dos Passos calls "newsreels' and the "cameras eye." The newsreels relate to short snippets of real news of the time, and while modern and innovative as a technique, now, nearly 100 years on, modern readers might struggle to understand the news references though a quick Google search will inform you. Even as an avid student of the World War I period, some of the newsreel sketches eluded me, but if you want to learn some cultural history, Google makes any newsreels you don't understand, easy to figure out and even learn from.

I still think Three Soldiers is Dos Passos best book of the post World War I period, but the USA trilogy is a very worthwhile read. I enjoyed The 42nd Parallel, enjoyed 1919 and look forward to the concluding volume, The Big Money.

Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan's scared of...

Part two of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy focuses on the years of World War I and the experiences of different types of Americans confronting this tumultuous period of political, social and geographical change.

While romantically regaled in many of the works of the period by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Dos Passos captures much of the darkness and ugliness of the time and the cynicism of a war waged to preserve the profits of banks and corporations leveraged by arming both sides of the conflict.

Like the first volume the novel uses four different narrative styles and weaves characters from very different backgrounds into and out of each other's lives.

Volume Three, the Big Money, awaits.

Interesting construction, but the characters ate so mired in selfishness, and the plot full of adultery, prostitution, cruelty, sexism, etc. that I couldn't make myself like or care about any of the characters.