"Only the unhappy man appreciates happiness. The happy man … displays it merely." These are words spoken in "Three Comrades," the novel by Erich Maria Remarque which would seem farthest from his latest because it is set in peace and relates young men's revels. Yet they are words that would make an accurate epigraph to "A Time to Love and a Time to Die," as well as to every other major work Remarque has written. As he returns, for the first time since "All Quiet on the Western Front," to the stench and terror of bomb shelter and infantry trench, it becomes apparent that he has never really left them. All his stories are moral, if not physical, war novels; all his heroes soldiers that dream of peace….
With "A Time to Love and a Time to Die,"… Remarque brings up to date a raw documentary of our century. He pictures an era in which crisis has become routine, catastrophe moves on ball bearings, death is efficiently administered and unsentimentally cleaned up, terror is commonplace and melodrama humdrum. Not only do individuals perish, but individuality collapses. For a while the malaise seemed to infect Remarque's own literary faculties. In recent books he expended them on events and conditions, not on beings and feelings. In "Arch of Triumph" and "Spark of Life" particularly he was concerned with the technical minutiae of suffering rather than the personal agony of the sufferer….
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