Have you ever finished the last page of a book and immediately turned to the first to begin it all over again? I never had, not before I read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Why am I constantly astounded when I read a classic and find it excellent? I remember being assigned Crime and Punishment in High School. I figured it would be torture. Who would have thought I'd be lying on the beach over vacation unable to put it down?

I picked up All Quiet on the Western Front accidentally. While visiting my parents recently, I absorbed their copy of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara - another page turner. In that book the author refers to Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Wasn't I supposed to have read that in High School? I went to the library looking for it. I couldn't come up with Crane's name right away and was too stubborn to look up the book. I wandered around the stacks and came to All Quiet on the Western Front. "Here it is ... no wait, different war book. Different war. I've always been curious about this one anyway, might as well pick it up."

Good God, what a book! Nothing like what I expected, and nothing like The Red Badge of Courage for that matter. I like Crane's book. But it was written in 1895 and, not surprisingly, it's a bit flowery. And Crane was not in the American Civil War. Still, it is a remarkable war book. All Quiet on the Western Front, however, has an immediacy that neither Shaara's nor Crane's novel mademe feel. Perhaps it's the war: The Civil War is History with the big "H." World War I does not seem as far away as the Civil War, nor as romanticized.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the first person narrative of Paul Bäumer, a 20 year old German soldier fighting in France. He was 18 when he first joined up. It's World War I (not that they knew that then), it's France, he's German. But it's not: it's anytime, it's anywhere, he's anyone. He's me, he's you, he's your brother. In the United States Germans are still often thought of as "the bad guy." I suppose that's a WWII thing. But I did wonder as I began this book, will I feel sympathy for this German, for "the enemy?" Turns out that's never a question. There are no enemies here. We are Paul. Even the French aren't enemies because they are not to him. If any one is the enemy it is the men who decided to go to war in the first place.

At once you are drawn in by the writing. Remarque's prose is simple, clear, concise, modern. Like his fellow modernists Willa Cather and Ernest Hemmingway Remarque's writing is immediate - it feels like now. It is beautiful in its sparseness. I have not read this book in German, nor could I, but the translation by A. W. Wheen must certainly be well done. I can only assume it is true to the original. The way these words are put together is timeless. By that I mean that nothing about them - except perhaps their fit into the modernist style - sets them in any one place or time. Paul Bäumer could be from Nebraska. He could be telling us this story today. What could make a tale of war more affecting then our complete identification with the narrator?

And Paul is no nonsense, he's matter-of-fact. That's what seems so crazy, so remarkable. True, he's somewhat dramatic when describing the worst horror, the worst fear, but he's generally a regular guy attempting to behave as regularly as possible in an insanely irregular position.

So many of the lines in this book have me wanting to read them to you out loud. I bought my own copy just so I could mark it up all for my own personal pleasure. Perhaps just this, a note at the beginning of the book: "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war." Remarque himself survived this war and lived until 1970. Survive is too strong a word - he wasn't killed. Nearly all of his nine subsequent novels dealt with war and inhumanity.

I want you to read this book. I'm not sure what I can say to encourage you to do so. I want you to read it and then give it as a gift to everyone you've ever met. And I want you to understand the title of this review, so please follow the link. I cannot do this book justice; I do not have that gift. If you read it I will have done something.

--Joanna Rubiner