[The Black Obelisk] is set in a small city in Germany in 1923, when the effects of the First World War are still cruelly felt and the signs of the war to come are growing clear. Ludwig Bodmer, twenty-five years old and a war veteran, has taken up life again in his native city and is scraping a living as the advertising manager of a tombstone firm…. Bodmer, who tells his own story in the present tense, is a man of singularly attractive personality. His view of life is tough, romantic, sympathetic, and amused. He feels anger at the injustice and despair he observes all around him, but he refuses to allow his anger to spread into a habit of daily bitterness. It is doubtful whether he can ever be sour. He has the air of a man who can see his most treasured dreams break and not try to console himself by picking up the pieces; consolation is not a thing he expects to find in life. He is looking for a girl to have an affair with, and his attempts at courtship are as funny and awkward as they are direct…. Mr. Remarque is completely in command of his story and in the best of form, whether he is evoking the dreams and desires of youth or observing the wretched struggle of ordinary people in defeat or simply passing the time in a city that he remembers well and that he makes familiar from the first page. The story is tragic, on the whole, and alive with the everyday manifestations of human pain, but from beginning to end it is characterized and illuminated by an incorrigible and irresistible humor. (pp. 174-75)
"Briefly Noted: 'The Black Obelisk'," in The New Yorker (© 1957 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. XXXII, No. 8, April 13, 1957, pp. 174-75.
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