Sardinian Brigade

click here for more details, find new or used items	Emilio Lussu Pages: 274 (Unknown Binding) Pub: Alfred A. Knopf, New York Pub date: 1939

Reader Reviews:

One Of The Neglected W.W.I Masterpieces (0/0 people found this helpful)

"W.W.I novels" is a phrase that usually evokes Hemingway, Remarque, Graves, Blunden, Sassoon... but there are many other outstanding writers who fought in that catastrophic war and survived and came back to tell us. Emilio Lussu, an Italian anti-Fascist politician and essayist, does not belong to the group of the celebrated anti-war writers, but he should be put there with the classics. His ironic, destructured, sometime grotesque, sometime almost absurdist memoir-novel deserves to be included in the list of the Great W.W.I Books. The original title is "Un anno sull'altipiano" (A Year on the Asiago Plateau), and it refers to the time spent by the Sassari Brigade (the "Sardinian Brigade" of the English title) on the Asiago Plateau, where some of the fiercest clashes between Italians and Austro-Hungarians took place. The experience of mountain warfare with the legendary Sassari Brigade (a.k.a. The Red Devils, or "Dimonios") made Lussu understand the atrocity, the madness and the uselessness of war. And that is what the book is all about--which is a lot, in this our time.

Lussu's dry, corrosive prose is an uncanny harbinger of masterpieces to come, such as Heller's Catch-22 or O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. Luckily English-speaking readers can read it again. (The book has uninterruptedly been in print in Italy since the 1940s, but has for a long time been out of print in the Anglospeaking world: don't miss this opportunity to discover a lost treasure of war narrative!)

Sardinian Brigade: the First World War in the Alps (1/1 people found this helpful)

This entertaining novel about the Italian experience of World War I has only recently been translated into English and is therefore little known in this country. This is a shame since the novel is unusual, insightful and moving, and above all funny. Lussu's prose is clear and readable, and he reveals new and interesting aspects of the war which provide a valuable contrast to other better known war novels. I recommend it highly.

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