≡ Libro Gratis The Narrow Road to the Deep North A novel Vintage International edition by Richard Flanagan Literature Fiction eBooks

The Narrow Road to the Deep North A novel Vintage International edition by Richard Flanagan Literature Fiction eBooks

Download As PDF : The Narrow Road to the Deep North A novel Vintage International edition by Richard Flanagan Literature Fiction eBooks

The Narrow Road to the Deep North A novel Vintage International edition by Richard Flanagan Literature Fiction eBooks

Something about the book irritated me. It felt consciously literary and inauthentic. The writing came across a bit like a James Salter wannabe. Sorry, but that's how it struck me. Contrast this book with something like Updike's Rabbit at Rest: the Updike feels genuine and while beautifully written, the language does not feel gratuitous. There are no cumbersome symbols or circles, no allusions or quotations. I forced myself to read this: I did not feel taken up by it. It didn't work for me.


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The Narrow Road to the Deep North A novel Vintage International edition by Richard Flanagan Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews

WOW!!! What a book!

* it’s moving yet sensitive;
* it’s raw with a no-holds bar attitude;
* it’s gruesome yet gripping;
* it sends you on a emotional roller-coaster ride yet somehow you can’t bring yourself to stop reading it even if you wanted to;
* it reminds me of The Memory Room;
* the lack of speech marks somehow adds to the story - it’s like a reflection spanning many years;
* it’s a story of contradictions - hopelessness yet they clung to routines with great fervour always hoping they’ll make it out alive even though specifically expressed;
* it’s book that trying to describe it doesn’t do it justice - it needs to be experienced.

This book leaves the reader with so many questions

1. How can humans treat fellow humans how the Japanese treated these POWs?
2. How can the Japanese (not sure if this is the case today) value life with such contempt and live with themselves?
3. Am I putting an Australian understanding of the value of life onto a culture that doesn’t share this belief?
4. How would I behave in the same situation?
5. Would I stand up to the Japanese or would I do what Dorrigo and others did and stand by and let the treatment that was meted out on the soldiers to continue? Would this make me as bad as the Japanese or do the normal rules of life not apply in a war situation?

This book tears at the heartstrings. I cried (view spoiler) This one statement held the rawest of truth and expressed so much more.

This book is an emotional roller-coaster ride which has a way of getting under your skin before you realise that it has done. I found I had to take a breather from the rawness and horror of the railway men’s plight - it was almost too painful to bear. It was at times ripping me apart.

Some of the characters

Dorrigo and Amy - The Dorrigo and Amy scene I didn’t feel added to the story very much and I was glad when they didn’t get back together. This book was not about, dare I say, frilly endings but rather about the harshness of something that belies all logic and decent humanity.

It show-cased how life is never the same after war for all those who were affected by it, but it also showed how easy it is to live in, and for, what could have been (i.e. Dorrigo essentially stopped living - or living a lie perhaps - because Amy wasn’t a part of his life anymore). Almost like Ella was second prize and yet she was exactly what he needed to continue living post the railway nightmare.

Japanese soldiers and Nakamura - I found myself wanting to hate the Japanese soldiers & Nakamura for what they were doing to the Aussie POWs, instead I found I was unable to because I realised that they were as much victims of their superiors as the POWs were of them. They were all puppets on a string.

Summing up
It showed how it is possible for humans to perform the most heinous attrocities yet somehow still manage to block out the severity of what they’re doing - probably because if they didn’t they would not be able to cope.
I wouldn't necessarily have chosen this book on my own, but my book group selected it and I'm glad I had a chance to read it. It's an interesting, if very painful, subject that we in the US never get a chance to learn much about.

In essence it tells the story of Australian prisoners held by the Japanese during World War II, and their forced slave labor to build a railroad through the jungles of southeast Asia. Most of the story is told through the eyes of one character, a self-centered doctor who, as the highest ranking surviving Australian officer, finds himself responsible for the welfare of the prisoners.

Though the book is a novel, the central character is based to some extent on at least one actual Australian officer who survived the POW camps. But while the character is interesting, the real story is the horrific brutality imposed on the prisoners by their Japanese and Korean guards. Without doing my own research, it's hard to know if the book exaggerates the brutality (beatings, torture, killings, starvation, living in mud without any sanitary accommodation, complete lack of medical care, forced slave labor in a filthy, diseased, oppressive jungle), but clearly circumstances of this type were imposed on prisoners by the Japanese during the war.

Perhaps as challenging to the reader as the murderous treatment of prisoners is the author's description of the Japanese point of view. In this telling, Japanese culture, philosophy and ethics at this time were epitomized by social attitudes that justified such brutal treatment as the norm for dealing with defeated foreigners. Unlike the case with Nazi war criminals who knew they were flouting international standards of behavior and reveled in the genocide they committed, this book's author presents the Japanese as not believing in any way that what they were doing was wrong. By the standards of their society, their behavior was entirely ethical, and those who were tried for war crimes afterward did not seem to understand why it was that they were being charged, tried and punished.

If this is a true depiction of Japanese culture in the 1940s, then, in effect, it makes a case for moral relativism, i.e., there is no objective or agreed upon morality between cultures. I find this very troubling as it means there can be no internationally accepted standards for behavior in conflicts between nations, thus no accountability for war crimes except insofar as the victor chooses to treat the vanquished.

A book that can cause me to stop and think through this sort of problem is a book worth reading. For while I found the violence in the story to be more graphic and more horrible than what I have read in almost any other book, it nonetheless was a valuable device for raising some important questions, as well as giving the reader a chance to learn about a very difficult episode (one among many) during World War II.
I don't understand why this book got the prize
Something about the book irritated me. It felt consciously literary and inauthentic. The writing came across a bit like a James Salter wannabe. Sorry, but that's how it struck me. Contrast this book with something like Updike's Rabbit at Rest the Updike feels genuine and while beautifully written, the language does not feel gratuitous. There are no cumbersome symbols or circles, no allusions or quotations. I forced myself to read this I did not feel taken up by it. It didn't work for me.