Catch-22

click here for more details, find new or used items	Joseph Heller Our price £5.94 (£7.99) New from £3.69 Used from £1.71 Pages: 576 (Paperback) ISBN: 0099477319 Pub: Vintage Pub date: 1994-10-06 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 378

Reader Reviews:

the best book I've ever read (0/0 people found this helpful)

Catch 22 is the best book I've ever read. This may seem to be a trite statement but of all the brilliant books I've come across, this one always rises to the top. It's humour is clever, persistent and cruel in places but that's life and you have to look on the funny side. It's absurdity is something you can relate to and the characters are wonderfully 3D. It's not a war book, though this is all it's about, instead it's a book which gives you hope because the anti hero triumphs. I love the journey through the time slot where every chapter is seen through another character in the story's eyes. So even people you despise at least you understand and can put them in context. It's a book to unfrustrate you, make you laugh, understand yourself a bit better and take you through any time of your life. It's a book you can taste and smell too. I read it first about 35 years ago and it still has an absolutely magical quality about it. Heller put everything into this book, don't bother with any of his other stuff. This is pure genius.

hard work, but funny (0/0 people found this helpful)

Always wanted to read this one, took a long time to finish, the story line gets repetitve with impossible situations just made worse, only comical sub plots kept me interested, but hey maybe this book just wasnt for me

A devastating anti-war satire (0/0 people found this helpful)

I love this book, and while I can understand why others don't, I think that often they approach the book with entirely the wrong perspective.

The point of the humour is that it is *black* humour. This book is not saying that war is funny at *all*; it is saying that war is pointless, futile, devastating, tragic,and it is above all a study of human character-their incompetence, arrogance, anxieties, their ability to endure but their ultimate reliance on fate (if not God), their mistakes, and yes, their humour. It's NOT, as one 1-star reviewer thinks, "sticking two fingers up at those millions of brave people who lost their lives"-it's MOURNING them and the stupidity of the war that killed them. The book is poignantly funny but is also a tragedy-it's above all a story about human nature and the innate insanity of the universe.

The characters all have their own personalities-my personal favourite is Milo: though he drives me absolutely raving *mad* I can't help but find his oddities fascinating(although I must admit, I never could understand exactly how he could buy eggs in Malta for 7 cents and sell them at a profit for 5 cents :S ) . I also love Ex-PFC Wintergreen (who's obviously running the entire war, with a little help from Milo...), Colonels Cathcart and Korn, both Peckham and Dreedle and, of course, Major Major Major and Yossarian. Yes, the plot can go in circles but there's always a different point to the retellings, always a different perspective, always more biting humour. I certainly count this as one of my all time favourite Anti-war fictions, up there with All Quiet on the Western Front in terms of emotional impact. Just because this book isn't explicitly hitting you over the head with the tragedy of war, but is disguising it through satire, doesn't mean it doesn't pack a punch.

Stunning (0/0 people found this helpful)

I must have read this novel at least ten times in my life and it conforms to my criterion for greatness: every time I read it: it changes. I read it every three or four years and the experiences I have gained since the last reading changes it, in many,varied and subtle ways.

For me, it is the most important twentieth-century novel.

Papier-marmite (0/0 people found this helpful)

I will start by saying that I simply can not understand how so many people have got so much out of this book.

Being a fan of the hilarious 'Flashman papers' by George MacDonald Fraser, I thought I would give this a try, it being something completely different and having many rave reviews.

After beginning to read it, there were a couple of genuinely funny moments in the first ten to fifteen chapters, but after that, the humour just bored me and made the book a complete chore to read.

Granted, Heller has some very valid points that he makes in the book about the absurdity of humans going to war and the process of fighting itself. However, upon finishing the book, I just felt that the entire thing had been a muddle and the humour really did not appeal to me at all.

One of the most infuriating points I found was that I absolutely hated every character in the whole book. I just could not feel for any of them. They were all annoying and about a third of the way through the book I was hoping Yossarian would just get shot down and have done with it.

Oh yes, and the ridiculous names of all the characters was another niggle of mine. It may have been funny when this book was first published but it really hasn't aged well.

This book, judging from the reviews on this site, is obviously the closest thing to papier-marmite as you can get. You really will either love it or absolutely hate it.

Begin reading with caution - it's a long book!

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