This short novel is kind of an inverse version of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun or Larry Brown’s Dirty Work. And is oddly the second novel I read this week (entirely by accident about a soldier wounded in a war lying in recovery missing huge parts of their face or brain). Unlike those other books, this book exists outside the consciousness of the wounded man. Here we have a story of friendship, marriage, loss, pain, recovery, and pressure told by the soldier buddy of the wounded man, and focusing primarily of the pain of the wounded man’s wife, before and after his wounding.
To be clear, the wounded man dies in the early parts of the novel and we flashback to the previous segments, so there’s no illusion of recovery. The wounds are so severe, there’s a kind of hyperbolic claim in the novel of him being the most wounded soldier of the war, and given the medical technology of the time, perhaps of all time (the paradox being that soldiers died for far less in our past).
The novel is slow and meandering and smoldering. It’s a truly painful novel in a lot of ways and the heavy and purposeful prose is poetic at times, and fully considered at all others. What strikes me about this book is while it is about the horrors of war, it’s not really all that much about war. While parts of the novel are essentially connected to war, this same story could be told in a way through any severe injury.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Eden-Elliot-Ackerman/dp/1101971568/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=waiting+for+eden&qid=1572817596&sr=8-1)
