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Bezig met laden... Buffalo Soldiersdoor Robert O’Connor
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Set on a luxuriously appointed and hopelessly corrupt Army base in Mannheim, Germany, where the soldiers prefer real-life race riots to mock combat, Robert O'Connor's viciously funny novel is conclusive proof that peace is hell and the U.S. Army is its ninth circle. In that hell, Specialist Ray Elwood is the ultimate survivor: a high-stakes drug dealer, bureaucratic con artist, and shrewd collector of other people's secrets. Elwood is contemplating cleaning up his act, although doing so will require one last, epic heroin deal. But of course it's then that his life will careen totally out of control. With its impeccably rendered cast of sycophants, drug burn-outs, and uniformed sociopaths, Buffalo Soldiers give us a scabrous, haunting vision of a military idled by the New World Order--and at all-out war with itself. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.77)
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And the movie pulled its punches in the way the book doesn't. The movie's tag line was a cheery "War is hell... but peace is f*#!%!! boring!". The book's epigraph is a far bleaker quote from Frederich Nietzsche: "When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself."
O'Connor's novel is black humour with a capital B, as the junkie hustler Elwood struggles to stay one step ahead of the greater forces of violence and corruption around him on a US Army base in Germany in the late 80s.
The absurdity of the armed forces in peacetime evokes echoes of the absurdity of "Catch-22" and the lost generation cynicism is more "Less than Zero" bitterness than "Generation X" whimsy. Elwood sees the world as a battle between staying one of the "motherfuckers" or descending to the level of the "motherfucked" - a battle that he ultimately loses.
The strength of the book is that the absurdity and surreal nature of the drug-crazed, drug-dealing, drug-manufacturing "fighting 57th" doesn't become mere "Animal House" hi-jinks, as they tend to in the movie. Its weakness is where the author's studied efforts for lower and lower levels of bleakness get pretentious. Having Elwood seduce the Top Sargent's one-armed daughter out of a combination of perversity and reckless bravado is one thing - but taking her for a picnic on the ruins of a Nazi concentration camp is simply wanky.
Still, unlike the movie, OConnor spares us any happy endings. It's pretty obvious from the beginning that Elwood is going to join the motherfucked and he inexorably does so in grand tragic style. As much as I don't begrudge Joaquin Phoenix's rather more pleasant Elwood escaping the hell of an army at peace in one piece, O'Connor's Elwood could only exit the Army one way.
But don't read the novel if you're having a really happy day. (