Another masterpiece
Summary
It’s possible that no author matches my sensibilities quite as well as Erich Maria Remarque. He manages to infuse some of the darkest stories with both humor and romanticism, leaving the reader with hope for a better world while confronting them with the reality of the world we live in.
Flotsam boasts an interesting set of protagonists, though one could certainly argue that no female characters are as fully developed. Some of the most powerful writing occurs in the last hundred pages in vignettes that reveals the fates of many of the characters throughout the text.
A powerful story, and a timely one.
“A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We’re living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What’s more, there are whole races who believe it!”
Wanderers should have no adventures that will tear out pieces of their hearts when they have to move on.”
The letters were there, leaning against one of the cups. Kern tore them open. He began to read and suddenly he forgot everything. These were the first letters he had received from Ruth. They were the first love letters of his life. As though by magic a load fell from his shoulders—disappointment that she was not there, nervousness, anxiety, loneliness. He read, and the black ink marks began to light up as though they were phosphorescent. Here suddenly was a human being who cared for him, who was distracted about what had happened to him, and who told him that she loved him.
Only a fool keeps souvenirs; they embitter your life.
The music surged down the stairs like a flashing stream—it gathered in the corridor and burst like a waterfall through the wide entry doors. It splashed over a small, lonely figure crouching on the lowest step, dark and colorless like an un-moving lump of black, a little hillock with mad, unresting eyes. It was the old man who had freed himself with such difficulty from the unrelenting window. He crouched in the corner, lost and done for, with bowed shoulders and knees drawn high, as though he would never rise again—and over him, and away in gay and flashing cascades, the music splashed and danced, strong, pitiless, unceasing as life itself.
She pressed her wet lips against his mouth. Thus she lay quietly, forgetting for a while her tortured body in which, in ghostlike silence, cancer cells ran riot and, under the spectral touch of death, uterus and ovaries were slowly falling like weary coals into gray amorphous ash.
“Man is magnificent in his extremes—in art, in stupidity, in love, in hate, in egotism and even in sacrifice; but what the world lacks most is a certain average goodness.”
