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Joseph Heller claimed he would have never written it had he never read The Good Soldier Švejk.
by Lariscus 3y ago
Joseph Heller claimed he would have never written it had he never read The Good Soldier Švejk.
- mooreds 3y agoHmm. A quick Google didn't find that. From https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/theater/newsandfeatures/the-model-of-a-soldier-but-no-model-soldier.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/theater/newsandfeatures/t... "Heller, who died in 1999, told various interviewers that Céline and Kafka were his most powerful influences and that "Svejk" was "just a funny book.""
- Zircom 3y agoFound a quote, had to use the anglicized spelling though. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/08/heller-201108 https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/08/heller-201108 "The Czech writer Arnošt Lustig claimed that Heller had told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn’t have written Catch-22 without first reading Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished World War I satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. "
- malermeister 3y agoGermanized, really.
- _visgean 3y agothere are some references in catch-22 and its follow up Closing time.
- bee_rider 3y agoI was really surprised by Closing Time. I forget all the details of it, but I remember finding it just relentlessly depressing. The only degree to which I thought it worked was, it really emphasized the extent to which we really don’t need to know what happens to characters after the story is done, it is better if we just imagine they go on to have their lives.
- _visgean 3y agoSame. It was so heavy compared to catch-22. But I am not sure the aging perspective could have been written any different.