A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin
A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin
2 Rating(s)
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A Soldier of the Great War

Author: Mark Helprin

Narrator: David Colacci

Unabridged: 31 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/16/2007

Synopsis

From acclaimed novelist Mark Helprin comes a lush, literary epic about love, beauty, and the world at war.Alessandro Giuliani, the young son of a prosperous Roman lawyer, enjoys an idyllic life full of privilege: he races horses across the country to the sea, he climbs mountains in the Alps, and, while a student of painting at the ancient university in Bologna, he falls in love. Then the Great War intervenes. Half a century later, in August of 1964, Alessandro, a white-haired professor, tall and proud, meets an illiterate young factory worker on the road. As they walk toward Monte Prato, a village seventy kilometers away, the old man—a soldier and a hero who became a prisoner and then a deserter, wandering in the hell that claimed Europe—tells him how he tragically lost one family and gained another. The boy, envying the richness and drama of Alessandro's experiences, realizes that this magnificent tale is not merely a story: it's a recapitulation of his life, his reckoning with mortality, and, above all, a love song for his family.

About Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin is the internationally acclaimed author of numerous works, including the New York Times bestsellers Winter’s Tale, In Sunlight and in Shadow, and Swan Lake.

About David Colacci

David Colacci has been an actor and a director for over thirty years, performing coast-to-coast in lead roles of plays by a variety of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Sam Shepard to Steve Martin. He has worked as a narrator for over fifteen years, during which time he has read the works of such authors as Jules Verne, Henry Adams, John Irving, Michael Chabon, and John Lescroart. He has won AudioFile Earphones Awards, earned Audie nominations, and been included in Best of the Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal. David was a resident actor/director with the Cleveland Play House for eight years and has been artistic director of the Hope Summer Rep Theater since 1992. He currently lives in New York with his wife, narrator and actress Susan Ericksen, and his children, Mario and Elena.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Violet on March 09, 2018

I'd probably argue that Mark Helprin's greatest asset can also be his greatest flaw. This is his mental exuberance. This book doesn't need to be 790 pages long. It's often his philosophical digressions, somewhat repetitive in nature, that I'd have been much more ruthless in weeding out. It's perhaps......more

Goodreads review by Steve on November 16, 2011

When we first meet Alessandro, the soldier from the title, he’s an elderly but still vital man who takes a principled stand against a streetcar driver who refused to stop for a would-be rider giving chase. Alessandro ends up getting off as a kind of protest and faces a distant journey on foot with t......more

Goodreads review by switterbug (Betsey) on February 07, 2012

A friend recommended this epic book to me despite knowing I wasn't fond of Helprin's novels. Well, he certainly perceived my taste fittingly, and I am forever indebted to him for persuading me to read this beautiful, evocative, deeply resonating story of a soldier-scholar living through WW I. This is......more

Quotes

“Extraordinary…A vast, ambitious, spiritually lusty, all-guzzling, all-encompassing novel.” New York Times Book Review

“A rousing tale…riotous energy and sustained brilliance…Helprin lights his own way, in his own singular direction.” Time

“Intense, memorable…magnificent…A massive, soaring novel of ideas and ordeals.” Entertainment Weekly

“Energetic prose, poetic images of great intensity, and an antic imagination combine in this gripping moral fable narrated by a septuagenarian irrevocably altered by World War I.” Publishers Weekly

“The language is rich without cloying, complex yet luminous in Helprin’s best style. In a number of thoughtful philosophical passages as engaging as any adventure story, Alesandro struggles to reconcile his appreciation of beauty and his religious faith with the horror around him. That he finally persuades us to believe in a ‘God without any hope, in a God of splendor and terror’ is testimony to the indomitable human spirit. Highly recommended.” Library Journal

“[An] ebullient, elegiac novel of destruction and survival…Tender, optimistic, and sumptuously presented: a feast of a novel, right down to Alessandro’s tender lingering over the final course.” Kirkus Reviews

Awards

  • Publishers Weekly bestseller
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