Peace | Richard Bausch | Man's (In)Humanity to Man

Peace | Richard Bausch | A Perfect Novel About War

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Peace

	Peace Richard Bausch Knopf, 2008 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

From the prize-winning novelist and world-renowned short story writer, recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Academy Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a powerful novel about war, trust, and salvation that begs to be read in a single sitting.

Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. A dismal icy rain, continuing unabated for days. Guided by a seventy-year-old Italian man in rope-soled shoes, three American soldiers are sent on a reconnaissance mission up the side of a steep hill that they discover, before very long, to be a mountain. And the old man?s indeterminate loyalties only add to the terror and confusion that engulf them on that mountain, where they are confronted with the horror of their own time?and then set upon by a sniper.

Taut and propulsive?with its spare language, its punishing landscape, and the keenly drawn portraits of the three young soldiers at its center?Peace is a feat of economy, compression, and imagination, a brutal and unmistakably contemporary meditation on the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.

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Man's (In)Humanity to Man

Richard Bausch's taut novel tells us what happens when civilian soldiers go to war. It's a powerfully atmospheric story about three American soldiers sent up a mountain in Italy near Cassino during the brutal winter of 1944. Their mission: see what the Germans are doing on the other side. Their mental state: conflicted by the shooting of a German woman they witnessed just before they left. Was it murder? An act of war? Should they report it when they return or simply fold it into their psyches? They struggle with the moral dilemma while they slog their way up the cold, miserable mountain.

Bausch's ability to bring the reader fully into his story is well-demonstrated in this book. The tension builds page by page until the wholly satisfying climax, the niggling arguments among the men are just repetitive and just disconcerting enough to make the reader angry, and the perfectly-mounted descriptions of the cold, hard rain, the wet, view-obliterating snow make you wish (just like the soldiers) that you were somewhere else.

Ambiguity is a beautiful thing in Bausch's hands. The squad's guide, Angelo, could be a simple peasant or a German spy--or something else entirely. The protagonist, Corporal Marson, could be a baseball-playing All-American hero or a morally-bereft corporal looking for the easy way out. How these and the other sources of tension in the book are resolved propels the reader through to the end.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds: A Novel of Scandal, Love and Death in the Congo

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A Perfect Novel About War

Richard Bausch has written a near perfect novel about war, in this case World War II, that period of world history that continues to engage writers and readers alike. Three American soldiers and their guide, an old Italian man, are sent on a reconnaissance mission in Italy in 1944. Most of the story takes place on one awful winter night and unfolds through the eyes of Marson. He is twenty-seven, from Washington D.C, in charge of the other two soldiers, and has a wife back home and a child whom he has never seen, whose "little cracked photo" he carries with him at all times. The other two G.I.'s are Asch, who is Jewish, from Boston and married to a woman 15 years his senior and Joyner, a single nineteen-year-old from Michigan who likes neither African Americans, Jews or Catholics. Angelo, the seventy-year-old enigmatic Italian, completes this foursome. These four men from four different parts of the world are thrown together by combat; and their lives, if they survive, will be forever changed by this night.

What Mr. Bausch gives the reader in this short novel of 171 pages is a picture of every war. Some men do cowardly things while others, left to their own devices, show both individual and collective courage under the worst of conditions. Although these men are frightened and are young and far from home and family, they do what they have to do. Certain scenes from this novel reminded me of another fine novel about this era, Tony Earley's THE BLUE STAR and even Mary Tillman's sorrowful nonfiction book BOOTS ON THE GROUND BY DUSK.

Mr. Bausch's language is spare and completely appropriate for his bleak subject in this richly nuanced novel where the characters come alive on every page. His discription of Marson's leave-taking from his family, so powerful and beautifully written, touches a chord in all of us who have ever left the comfortable nest of home for whatever reason: "It came to him [Marson] that he had taken this scene, this street, these people, for granted, had simply accepted all of it, and them, as his world. He had a thought: this is the surround. Just the word, surround, in that sentence, seemed freighted with new meaning. It could not be spelled any other way, was not the word surroundings. It was a different word. It was his life itself, containing his home, these parked cars, this house, this sky. . . It caught his breath."

PEACE will speak to you on many levels. I have only read previously the novel VIOLENCE by this writer. I suspect that the loss is mine.

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Well worth your reading time

From an American master comes the riveting short novel about three soldiers' experience while on a reconnaissance mission in 1944 Italy. Richard Bausch's Peace is an impeccable novel that can be read, and will probably be read, in one evening. A mere 171 pages, the author uses sparing language and an immense amount of detail to paint a harrowing wartime experience.

The time is winter. It's been raining steadily for days. An American patrol encounters a farmer with a load of hay. Buried beneath the hay are a Nazi soldier and a female. The Nazi takes out two of the Americans, and in retaliation the Americans kill the two fleeing Germans.

This incident establishes the need for a scouting patrol that has been ordered to see what is on the other side of the hill. As three soldiers, guided by a seventy-year-old Italian man, begin their ascent, the rain quickly turns to sleet and makes their climb exceedingly more treacherous. Before too long, the men realize that they are not merely climbing a hill, but rather a mountain. The higher they go, the colder it becomes and before they reach the top, a heavy snow starts to fall.

The entire story takes place on the mountainside as the four climb. There they are confronted, for the first time, with the realization that they may truly die. More than their own demise, the soldiers are unwitting witness to an execution of Jews, thereby sealing the truth about the rumors of the German atrocities that became the Holocaust. Then the soldiers become the targets of a sniper as they race down the mountain.

Bausch does a remarkable job in delineating the three characters and provides riveting account of their reactions to death. The details of the mountainside and the cold and the snow are equally spellbinding; I found myself reaching for a blanket when it was ninety degrees outside.

I wasn't sure that I could appreciate the American soldier more than I already do, but Peace makes me feel proud to be an American and thankful that so many fight to keep my way of life secure.

Armchair Interviews says: Quality you expect from Richard Bausch.

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A fine piece of writing

Bausch's book is very well-written, The prose is taut and there's none of the grasping at profundity that ruins much of contemporary American writing. He doesn't hit you over the head with "MEANING" either...he allows you to read the story and draw your own conclusions about the nature of man, war, and violence.

I think the jacket blurb comparing the book with Tolstoy and Conrad is overblown, but those are fairly impossible standards anyway. In a country where writers like Micheal Chabon and David Eggers are lauded as great authors, this is a refreshingly meaningful and unpretentious bit of art.

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Nearly like Hemingway and a good summer read.

This is my first read of this author and I enjoyed my introduction. The author uses often short, crisp sentences for dialogue and setting description. The length of the soldiers' mission seemed unrealistic, which took away from the story's credibility. However, this was a small issue to an otherwise gripping read.

Is this an anti-war book? Well, it's an anti-killing and anti-hatred book. The author only uses WWII-Italian front as the setting to set his views. Frankly, I didn't find the first "atrocity" incident as troubling as how it was intended, but the last scene was morally more provoking regardless of its being predictable.

Overall, I would quickly recommend this book. It would also make for an interesting assignment in an ethics course.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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