Last year I finally delved into Remarque, author that I have been around all the way from high school but never got around it, I likely postponed it thinking his work might be too dry and focused on war. And what a beautiful surprise it was when I started reading The Night in Lisbon - the prose was stunning! He is a master of storytelling and he writes so beautifully. Since then I read three of his works and just started the "Gate of Triumph". Let's talk about them.
The Night in Lisbon
A story of escape from the war in 1939 follows a German emigrant persecuted by the Nazi regime he refused to submit to.
While watching a ship in Lisbon that is about to sail for America - the promised land - he meets a man of similar fate, in whom he sees the same despair and helplessness he has felt many times in his own struggle for freedom. The stranger offers him two tickets for the ship, asking only that he listens to his confession in return. It is the story of his wife Helen and their love, of hiding identities, of a time when the murderer’s passport opened all doors, while the passport of the disobedient led straight to the camp.
Structured as a confession meant to ease the burden of the soul, the book form-wise gives the vibe of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata. The style is beautiful, the pacing fluid, and the tension is sustained throughout the novel. A remarkable first encounter with Remarque, beginning from his final work. It's also filled with beautiful quotes. I always recommend this book to people!
“By day Lisbon has a naive theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover.”
All Quiet on the Western Front
You have likely heard of this one or even saw the recent movie adaptation. The novel exposes the horrors of war and reveals its absurdity through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier and his young comrades. There is no beauty here, except the extraordinary beauty of the language itself — no search for heroism as in Hollywood tales, only the raw truth of the brutality and repulsiveness of World War I on the French front, told by a writer who lived through it himself. One can almost hear the whistling of bullets and smell the damp soil of the trenches rising from Remarque’s words.
“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
Heaven Has No Favorites
To distinguish it from the previous two Remarque novels I’ve read (The Night in Lisbon and All Quiet on the Western Front), I’d give Heaven Has No Favorites a four star grade — though it’s still a powerful, poignant story where love and the inevitability of death intertwine. A runaway young woman, seriously ill, and a race car driver, a war veteran, embark on a journey that they hope will give meaning to their lives - yet the shadow of the past and the vision of an unhappy future follow them everywhere. These are broken people in a desperate attempt to find happiness, even though deep down they don’t believe they deserve it.
The novel unfolds mostly through dialogue, so Remarque’s usual lyricism doesn’t shine as much. Yet his trademark portrayal of a lost generation in a challenging time remains, and that unavoidable awareness that, in their loss, we recognize fragments of ourselves.
“It’s odd,’ she murmured, ‘but as long as we don’t forget that we’re falling and falling, nothing is lost. Life seems to love paradoxes - when we think we’re perfectly safe, we’re always ridiculous and on the verge of a tumble; but when we know we’re lost, life showers gifts on us. Then we don’t have to do a thing - it runs after us like a poodle.”
Final words
Three novels - three perspectives of the lost generations affected by war. All Quiet on the Western Front opens it with the trauma of war; The Night in Lisbon carries it into the horror of exile and fear with the beautiful love story; Heaven Has No Favorites concludes it with the desperate attempts and inability to find meaning after all is over. Yet in Remarque’s world, human spirit is not forsaken and lost - it flickers in those who still have the courage to love, even when they are crushed by life's cruelty.