He reads because he needs it, because he likes it, every day. He read classics, novelties, foreign novels, announced masterpieces. And one day, he came across a book which, according to him, surpasses all the others.
“It took me less than a few paragraphs to realize that I was probably reading the best thing I have ever read, or that I will never read”, entrusts Steffan Rhys, journalist and reader of reading, at Daily Express. It is not a novel with a spectacular intrigue or a breathless suspense, nor a book that seeks to cry or seduce by emotion. This novel plays on another register: that of the absurd, of the twisted logic, of the bitter comedy. It shows grotesque situations told with a total seriousness. The action takes place in the middle of the Second World War, but history is not like any other.
From the first lines, the tone is set: the main character is hospitalized because of a strange symptom, a “liver pain that bordered by jaundice”. Doctors hesitate, do not know how to decide. “If it was really a jaundice, they could treat it. If it disappeared, they could let it go out. But being constantly on the verge of the jaundice disoriented them”, he summarizes. The kind of passage which, according to him, says everything of the book in a few lines. It’s funny, confusing, precise, and it pushes to continue.
But it is not only a literary farce. It is also a harsh criticism of war, military hierarchy, absurd rules that are applied without thinking. The novel accumulates situations where each attempt to escape a rule turns against the one who is trying to escape it. Over the pages, we come across colorful characters: a man who voluntarily bored to have the impression that time passes more slowly, an officer so average that everyone realizes, a series of lost, resigned or rebellious soldiers, trapped in a system that exceeds them. The tone is sometimes delusional, sometimes creaky.
This novel did not have immediate success when it was released, but it gradually gained massive recognition. Today, it is studied, cited, adapted, translated into many languages … It is therefore not only a personal experience. Other readers, other criticisms, share the same feeling: the novel Catch 22 by Joseph Heller remains unique. It was written in 1961, barely sixteen years after the end of the war, and yet the questions it raised remain current.
In 2015, the Guardian ranked it among the 100 best novels in English. Literary criticism thus describes him as “An absurd and ruthless comedy that suggests the deep void that hides in the heart of things”. Steffan Rhys recognizes that others will prefer more classic, more linear, more moving novels. But for him, it is definitely this one who sits at the top of his list. Inspiring.
