1919 is the second novel in John Dos Passos USA trilogy. I gave it a three star rating because I'm conflicted about the work. I appreciate the techniques Dos Passos uses to infuse biography, stream-of-consciousness and the "Newsreel" collage of whirlwind events into the stories of several characters. And I liked how we meet the same characters at times through a different perspective. However, the Newsreels and stream-of-consciousness moments were much too cryptic. I like how the reader learns something about the history of labor in America...a subject often neglected in our schools. However, the socialist/communist slant is laid on too thickly. Note that Dos Passos was an admirer of communism but later changed course to become a total right-winger.
Another quibble.... for a work that is part of a trilogy called "USA", about 75% of the book takes place in Europe... ok, its during WWI...but still, I didn't see the compelling reason to have so much of the focus there. Overall, although I will read the third part of the trilogy, "The Big Money", I'm not really looking forward to it.

Now I understand Dos Passos' fame and repute. I liked 42nd Parallel ok, but this one is brilliant.

Wow! It packs a punch, particularly at the end when there is a description of the life of the Unknown Soldier buried at Arlington Cemetery. I got to hear some of the elite soldiers selected to guard the tomb talk about the high symbolism and importance of their duty, marching with perfect precision back and forth the tomb in all weather, and this book puts the lie to all displays of American patriotism after describing how men fighting in the labor movement were tortured and murdered and also telling the stories of well-to-do loafers who got promoted to being officers in the war (WWI) and just drank and cavorted all the time.

If you ever believed that there was a time when America had greater moral
fiber than it does now, this book will cause you to pause and reflect on our history.

Of course, Dos Passos's political views veered right later in his life after he wrote the USA trilogy. I will have to find some scholarship to see how he himself reflected on this work in his later years. It is sobering, to say the least.

Moved onto the second novel in the trilogy. The 42nd Parallel lead up to the First World War and this one covers events around that time. Some of the characters carry on through from before but some are new.

I felt this carried on very much as before. The Newsreel and The Camera techniques, the rapid description of events in little mini-stories, people using offensive names for each other, lots of sex, asides about major historical figures, characters getting into socialism. There are some very powerful episodes - like the execution of the tsar's family, the killing and torture of strikers, and the unknown soldier section at the end, the surprising ending of the story of 'daughter' - but was is most surprising is how the actual war is largely talked around with American characters volunteering, working, sailing, partying and agitating for socialism to, from and around Europe but very few actually fighting. I think the author's point may well be the whole First World War was a betrayal of the Working Class by the capitalists and people in power but it seems strange to write a big, important book about the First World War and focus so little on the actual war itself.

It is still good and really interesting in parts, but I am not yet seeing how the myriad of parts might all come together in a cohesive whole and I did find that the stop/start of the lives of the characters many of whom seem very similar does make it hard to differentiate them properly from each other. I will move onto the next one to see how it all plays out.

Just as good in terms of its use of language and narrative constructions as its predecessor and moves quite beautifully to a dark, sad ending and a poignant, growing understanding of just how deeply lost almost all its titular characters really are, caught in the whirlwind of personal desires, complicated relationships and the inevitable march of history + war. However, my enjoyment has slightly lessened after realizing the relative lack of uniqueness to these characters. There's several distinguishing characteristics, to be sure, but there's also so many similarities to most of the same-sex characters that after a time started to irritate me slightly. Perhaps it's merely part of larger point, but still...Also increasingly weirded out by how this supposedly panoramic and epic portrait of 20th-century Americans exclusively focuses itself on the woes of white people, there's so far been one dude of Irish descent (a detail that matters not at all), one Jewish person (who has exactly one "chapter") and one bisexual (whose sexuality is spoken of quickly and never spoken of again). It feels a shitty thing to say, especially since I don't know much about the author, but it does make me wonder just who exactly does he consider worth writing of and why. Obviously too beautiful and well-written to not be spoken of, but that is also undeniably a serious flaw.

Perhaps I would have liked this book better if I hadn’t had to write an essay every 70 pages, but I still think I would have remained completely bored regardless. I respect what Passos was trying to do with his narrative style, but it fell flat for me because I was basically numbed by the complete lack of interest I had in this book to the point where I could not appreciate any of the finer qualities that make this work a “classic.” Despite all of its ~deeper meanings~, this novel remained for me 380 pages of absolutely nothing happening. I get that that was kind of the point, but maybe I didn’t need to put myself through a reading experience completely devoid of any sense of enjoyment to understand that. Additionally, while in the 42nd parallel I found that the camera eyes often felt very relevant to the main text and were one of the better parts of the overall reading experience, in this book, especially towards the end, they just became almost meaningless blocks of text. Some of them were mostly in French so maybe there was something I was missing in there, but even the decipherable bits just felt random. They certainly didn’t add anything to my understanding. Also, and maybe it’s just me, but I really don’t feel like I understand the America of 1919 more from reading about the various experiences random twenty-somethings have with prostitutes. Sure it’s a part of how they lived their lives, but does essentially the same scene have to be repeated over and over again? Repetition is fine, just not to the point it was taken to here. Well, I could rant more...but I’ll save my energy for my last (hopefully) essay about this exhausting book.

I really loved the stories in this book and what I learned about WWI, the war that was to end all wars. I encourage anyone to read this. You will learn about workers struggling for their rights, even to get their pay, it featured even Sailors who get cheated of their pay time after time. People fall in and out of love. Soldiers fight, get sick and die. Everyone is socially pressured to be part of the war effort. But the war really isn’t about what people think it is. Read about what it is really about in the part about the peace negotiations. This is a book that I think is still relevant to our times. You will find the racist language shocking at times, that helped me understand how deeply racism was imbedded in our cultural past.

What I didn’t like was that there were quite a few passages written in French. Since I don’t know any French I skipped over these sections knowing I might miss out on knowing something important.

"Do you know? I was thinking how fine it would be if you could reorganize the cells of your body into some other kind of life . . . it's too damn lousy being a human . . . I'd like to be a cat, a nice comfortable housecat sitting by the fire."
"It's a hell of a note," said Steve, reaching for his shirt and putting it on. A cloud had gone over the sun and it was suddenly chilly. The guns sounded quiet and distant. Dick felt suddenly chilly and lonely. "It's a hell of a note when you have to be ashamed of belonging to your own race. But I swear I am, I swear I'm ashamed of being a man . . . it will take some huge wave of hope like a revolution to make me feel any selfrespect ever again . . . God, we're a lousy cruel vicious dumb type of tailless ape." "Well, if you want to earn your selfrespect, Steve, and the respect of us other apes, why don't you go down, now that they're not shelling, and buy us a bottle of campagny water?" said Ripley.


revolution round the spinning Eiffel tower
that burns up our last year's diagrams the dates fly off the calendar we'll make everything new today is the Year 1 Today is the sunny morning of the first day of spring We gulp our coffee splash water on us jump into our clothes run downstairs set out wideawake into the first morning of the first day of the first year

Interesting article about this trilogy: //www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/w...

The racist and sexist language is shocking in this day and age. Was Dos Passos using it casually as the standard of the time? Or was he trying to show that the WASP men who were protesting/unionizing for workers's rights were ambivalent about including non-white, Italian, and Jewish immigrants? Was he oblivious or commenting on the sorry state of women at the time?

One reviewer compared this trilogy unfavorably with Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook--also on my to-read list. Here's hoping I can read it soon so I can compare also!

Onward toward the third book...

This second novel in Dos Passos's trilogy _USA_ (really one big novel) is more assured and more powerful than the first novel (_The 42nd Parallel_). We meet new characters, see familiar characters through the eyes of characters who were only a minor part of the first volume, and get a broad panorama of the US experiences in World War I and the Red Scare of 1917-1919. Dos Passos's use of the formal experimentation techniques he developed in the first book are more assured and tighter, his biographies center on subjects that he doesn't wholly approve of (such as Woodrow Wilson and JP Morgan), and there is even an actual climax to this novel even as you can see that Dos Passos is setting up the subject of the final book in the trilogy (_The Big Money_), with a focus on labor strife, the rush for oil-rich territory on the part of US oil interests versus the British and the Dutch, and the continued importance of advertising to spin the news and ensure consumption. Dos Passos had a keen understanding of how advertising and other forms of propaganda influenced popular consciousness about the war and patriotism, and that's one of the most important messages of this work. This novel stands with _Manhattan Transfer_ as Dos Passos' strongest (fictional) writing.

1919, The Second Part in the Trilogy U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, one of the 100 Best Novels on The Modern Library List https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100... and on The Realini List
10 out of 10


You could read the chef d’oeuvre U.S.A. more or less for ever - granted, there is still The Big Money to start and finish, Insha’Allah – because, well, it is so long, the stories that intertwine are so mesmerizing, captivating, and on another level, you tend to forget who Eleanor Stoddrad is, what is her connection with Eveline and just as you looked at your notes or on the internet to see what you forgot from some chapters ago, you come across the new figure of Daughter, the Texas Belle that catches your imagination and makes you forget the other personages that have moved fast, separated by news reels, the entrance of real historical personages like Woodrow Wilson, with his plans to end all wars, Thomas Edison.

The latter is known among other things for his invention of the light bulb…When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times", Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times…The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps…Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophe"…this is used in the positive psychology lectures of Harvard Professor Tal Ben Shahar - available on YouTube and the most popular in the history of Harvard – a professor that has a leit motif, he repeats the notion that ‘Learn to Fail or Fail to Learn’…and this is what he wishes for his students, that they fail more…
We meet in 1919 some of the characters from the first part, The 42nd Parallel http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/06/t... and one of them is Joe, the one that has been on the run and he is having trouble with the law again, albeit this time it does not seem to be his fault, when he is suspected of being a German spy and arrested in Britain, where he is put through the motions we are quite familiar with now, an inspection of the body and humiliation…someone from the consulate comes to see the prisoner, and complains about his missed golf match – incidentally, there is a joke that looks at the way we spend our lives, wherein a man is thinking of golf when at work, then of sex on the golf course and when having sex, he thinks of work…maybe not in that order

The message being that we need to be living in the present and be ‘in control’, in order to reach Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/02/f... and not always absent and missing the moment – Carpe Diem as in Dead Poets Society – as for Joe, he is released from jail, he even asks about something to eat, addressing the embassy employee with ‘mister Consul’, and applying thus one of the rules of How to Win Friends and Influence People and having to hear the young golfer protest that they do not have funds for charity and there is only the boat going back, but eventually giving Joe a shilling…
Joe helps save half the men from the ship he works on and he is praised for this by the captain, after they are lost and their vessel had been sunk, and the captain insists that Joe is special and he has the material, character required for an officer and seeing that there are many required, he should study and become one…Joe marries, but eventually, this bond will not last, indeed, one critic has observed that the characters in the Trilogy do not forge stable relationships and they fail, only that happens in so many real life scenarios…furthermore, critics have been enthusiastic, including the one who wanted more success stories, or at least one..

The very modern combination of stories, newspaper collages has stood the test of time very well – according to The New Yorker - and in the mix, we have Dick aka Richard Savage, who lives with his brother, Henry, and his mother in the house of their aunt Beatrice, where they pay for rent and still feel humiliated…he meets Hilda, the married woman, wife of a pastor, who pushes him to have intercourse with her and then rejects the boy, who is about sixteen now and not yet ready to suffer a romantic deception…Evelyn Hutchins has her own share of dejection when she becomes infatuated with a man that is self-obsessed…

He is so selfish and narcissistic that he declares his love for himself is above all else and besides, he is not the marrying kind…eventually, Evelyn falls again for the wrong man, a married painter called Pepe, who is seeing his lover twice a week, until his wife finds drawings and paintings that testify to what had been going on between her husband and the woman depicted in the images…Pepe declares that Evelyn could have his baby – for one may be coming – she has the manes, she is not poor and he will be proud, but his spouse has made him promise he will stop seeing his mistress and that is the end of it…
In the second part of the U.S.A. Trilogy we meet another intriguing character, the one called Daughter, a Belle from Austin, Texas, a very determined, courageous woman – indeed, most of the female personages, and the male ones admittedly, are brave fighters, many, if not most of them involved in the fight for the poor, leftist ideas – which the under signed rejects, because of that old ‘witticism’ which states that if one is not a commie when young, one has no heart, but if one is still a commie when older, one has no brain…it is hard to admit to aging, but let us just say that I realized at a tender age how benevolent, wondrous the commies were – and they are volunteering to serve as nurses, participate in strikes, take care of heroes of the proletariat – here we may think of the alleged quote from George Orwell who seems to have said ‘that middle-class socialists don't care about the poor, they just hate the rich’ http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/05/n...

Daughter is wild for a period, albeit her arrest is not justified by some criminal activity, on the contrary, she is witness to a protest where the police is more than violent – they show in fact a contempt for the law that should have placed the authorities in prison – and some individuals beat and abuse a young woman and therefore force Daughter to act and try to defend the poor girl…her brother is killed in an airplane accident, that is not on the frontline and this is making Daughter mad – it would be conceivable for a tragedy to occur in the war, but when it takes place far away, because some traitor had not checked the airplane and failed at his job is outrageous, enraging for Daughter, who also fears for the life of their father, who could die too as a consequence of this trauma…probably the only qualms I have with this Magnum opus is the leftist views of most of the protagonists…

Triloogia teine raamat jätkab vormi poolest sama stiili nagu esimene (on konkreetsed võtmetegelased, kelle elu ja tegemiste kaudu jutustatakse ameeriklaste elust esimese maailmasõja ajal, kuid endiselt on ka "Kaamerasilma", "Retrospektiivi" ja mõne tuntud inimese eluloost vahepalad).
Kui triloogia esimeses raamatus tundusid fiktiivsed tegelased kulgevat autori poolt endale määratud teel paralleelsetel sirgetel, omavahel suuremat ristumata, siis teise osa ülesehitus meenutab veidi juba mitmetasandilist ristmikku, kus püünele tuleb nii varasemast tuttavaid olulisi tegelasi kui hüppab ka mõni selline, keda esimeses raamatus mainiti õige kergelt, kes aga nüüd astub rambivalgusse pikemalt, kusjuures ka ajaga mängimist võib veidi kaasneda ;)

Tegevus toimub suuresti Prantsusmaal ja esimese maailmasõja ajal, seda isegi veel enne, kui USA ametlikult sõtta astub. Eks see sõjaeelne ja -aegne suhtumine on nii nagu ikka olnud. Mõni astub uljalt tegevusse, mõni püüab kõiki vahendeid kasutades viilida, mõni katsub olukorda enda kasuks pöörata. Kes pelgab lahingustseene, siis võin rahustada, et ega neid suurt olnudki. Peamiselt ikka unistatakse eesootavast (mitte alati küll sõja lõpust ja rahust, vaid revolutsioonist, oma ideede jõulisest elluviimisest). Ja mis seal salata, kõige rohkem tundub käivat ikka pidu ja pillerkaar, hea söök ja šampanja, lõbujanust kantud armusuhted ja sellest johtuvad soovimatud rasedused jms. Sõda võib käimas olla, aga elu läheb edasi ja seda pöörasemalt.