Book Cases: Love and war

Friday, June 26, 2015

Did the love story grow on you? Or did you continue to find it less engaging than the war passages? What did you think of the ending?

kc said...: The love story never grabbed me. I just didn't find their relationship that compelling. I didn't understand what they saw in each other, really, other than a kind of impersonal escapist fantasy. (I was a little touched at the end, though, when they saw each other from afar). Part of the problem was that I just didn't have a lot of sympathy for the male lead. His womanizing just felt like a kind of pitiful neediness to me, like women were more or less blank canvases that he worked out his emotional issues on. I was much more interested in him as a soldier and doctor. The war story was amazing.

The juxtaposition of the love and war stories reminded me of the line from Casablanca: "it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three (in this case two) little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world (where people die horrible deaths in Japanese war camps)."; 1:41 PM, June 30, 2015
kc said...: Oh, the ending. I did not like the fire scene at all. It seemed contrived and goofy. But maybe I'm missing something.; 1:50 PM, June 30, 2015

Friday, June 26, 2015