I'd seen the movie A Midnight Clear and enjoyed it, so when I saw the novel upon which the movie was based on the "Experienced Books" shelf at Northside News, I happily gambled a dollar.
I have not been disappointed. It's a great read thus far, with the added bonus that it's been probably a dozen years since I saw the movie so that, while I may remember broad plot outlines ("She dies in the end,") the story is still fresh for me. Unless it crashes and burns badly in the last fifty pages, I have to recommend it as a good first-person novel of WWII. If you can imagine the travelogue portions and historical overviews excised from William Manchester's Goodbye, Darkness, leaving only the first-person narrative, you'll have a good idea of the tone and texture.
(PS: If I haven't extolled the virtues of the "Experienced Books" rack at Northside News, let me do so here. It's nothing but classics and a few selected best-sellers, all $1/each. In the last couple of months I've snagged Kim, Lord of the Flies, The Gulag Archipelago, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer, and McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader, as well as Still Life With Woodpecker, Hannibal, A Midnight Clear, Force 10 From Navarone, The Hunt for Red October, and The Bear and the Dragon. As far as used book racks go, it's like a canned hunt or fishing in a stocked pond with dynamite.)
(PPS: Hey, Marko, you should read A Midnight Clear. It's mostly in first-person, present-tense.)
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2 comments:
Oooh, I love to go to the local library sales. they sell the books by the POUND.
Here I thought I was the only person in NATO who had heard of it. I'll have to check out the book now. Jim
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