Cara Hoffman's Top 5 War Novels

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Celine
This is not just my favorite war novel, it’s my favorite novel. Celine was a polymath, physician to the poor, anarchist, soldier, and the father of black humor. The first 30 pages of this first person novel deal with combat in the First World War. The rest is about the protagonist’s adjustment to life after the war. It’s one of the funniest, darkest books I’ve read. Smart, full of passion for life and hatred for those who kill. The hallucinatory scene in the shooting gallery is hilarious and deeply sad.

Suite Francaise By Irène Némirovsky
Némirovsky was a French Ukranian intellectual and writer who translated Chekov. She had intended to write a series of five novels but was arrested in 1942 by the German police as “a stateless person of Jewish decent” and died in Auschwitz the same year, having completed only the two novellas which comprise the book. Descriptions of flight from Paris and the impending German occupation, and the horrors of civilian life during war are excellent and challenge the narrow ideas that only those who take part in the violence of battle understand and qualified to describe it.

Sand Queen by Helen Benedict
A breakthrough novel that should be read by everyone. The story of a young American soldier and prison guard in Iraq who deals with tremendous sexual discrimination and assault, and a young Iraqi woman whose father is wrongfully arrested and imprisoned. Benedict’s descriptions of life for women on base are harrowing and heartbreaking. For example, not being able to go to the bathroom or take a shower without bringing another woman battle buddy because the threat of violent sexual assault is constant.

1984 by George Orwell
People either think this novel deals only with surveillance and propaganda or that it’s science fiction, but it’s really about a nation at perpetual war and the price the civilian population pays to maintain it. 1984 might well be the quintessential war novel because there is not one word in it that sensationalises violence or tries to put a human face on the will to power.

The Short Timers by Gustav Hasford
This is the novel Full Metal Jacket was based on. It’s far better than the movie and, I think, the best Vietnam novel ever written. Like Orwell and Celine, Hasford does not sensationalise war or glorify soldiers. The depictions of basic training, where teenagers are destroyed and rebuilt so they can go on to destroy others is absolutely amazing. Likewise, the descriptions of soldiers wanting to kill their commanding officers. I doubt such an unsentimental and lucid book could be written or published by someone today.

Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman is out on 24th April from Virago Press.

Photo credit: Constance Faulk