Angel down

In a book published exactly one hundred years ago, the German writer Peter Flamm described the moral devastation and psychological disorientation of the First World War through a disturbing and dreamlike tale of mistaken identities and documents stolen from corpses – a story that vividly conveys the wounds with which the whole of humanity was forced to grapple after the war. The Great War marked the beginning of a long nightmare of violence, and literature has sought countless ways to recount its devastation – a multitude of perspectives in an attempt to understand the incomprehensible: human evil. Céline wrote that ‘war was everything that could not be understood’, and these words could very well be inscribed on the title page of Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down, a novel set on the French battlefields of the First World War but which weaves a supernatural element into the narrative, symbolising precisely the attempt to make sense of the violence and the soldiers’ natural mistrust during the conflict. Angel Down revolves around five soldiers’ search for the source of a voice that crushes the troops’ spirits; they discover it comes from a wounded angel, trapped amidst the mud and blood, who must be saved not least because he appears to harbour a secret: the way to end the conflict. Cyril Bagger, one of the five soldiers—more interested in getting out alive than in appearing valiant, and thus a far cry from the epic and cloying image of the soldier—is willing to do anything to save himself, even to betray and deceive his comrades who, obeying the timeless maxim ‘homo homini lupus’, will be ready to do the same. There is no need to dwell at length on what happens, not least to preserve the mystery of the reader’s journey, whilst it is more interesting to highlight how Kraus’s choice—for which he won the Pulitzer Prize—to blend historical narrative, horror and the supernatural represents one of the most original approaches to understanding the darkness of the human soul in times of crisis and suffering – an exploration that transcends the specific historical moment, transforming into a comprehensive examination of human actions and choices, of human selfishness and fragility. Written as a single uninterrupted sentence in a succession of short paragraphs linked by the anaphoric opening with the conjunction “and” (a frenetic rhythm that does not shy away from lyrical moments and is perfectly rendered in Andrea Cassini’s translation), Angel Down ends with a comma: is this very absence of a conclusion not the most powerful symbol of the endless violence that punctuates history?

   

Daniel Kraus
, "Angel Down
", Ne/oN, 304 pp., 21 euros