The New York Times - Larry Rohter
…Mr. Ayrton has captured the global sweep of the conflict…The real strength of No Man's Land is the sheer diversity of the voices it offers, especially those from fronts often overlooked or considered peripheral in the United States and Britain…No Man's Land doesn't favor either side, and is unblinking in its portrayal of the generalized brutality that the war fomented.
Open Letters Monthly
An endlessly fascinating collection of bits and excerpts of fiction arising from the war. Ayrton’s No Man’s Land is hard reading almost from start to finish, but by its final pages it’s achieved the near-impossible feat of making the First World War’s horrors feel freshly, agonizingly new.”
The Times Literary Supplement
Handsomely produced and aptly titled. The impressive number of other nationalities and other fronts it represents is unusual. Pete Ayrton's volume will undoubtedly send people in search of the books from which he has drawn such enticing extracts. Marvelous.
The Herald
Harrowing but brilliant accounts of the human cost of war. In all its calculated costs of cruelty, its human impact, its formidable weapons of death and destruction and - yes - its futility, is captured brilliantly in this remarkable, wide-ranging anthology.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
You’ll find war celebrities like Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque, but also Greeks, Turks, Czechs and Indians with names like Prezihov Voranc, Emilio Lussu, Mulk Raj Anand and Josep Pla.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Much of the fiction written during and after World War I centered on that carnage and its cost, physically, morally, politically. But for the most part, the voices have been English, or its American variant, with occasional French and German accents. No Man's Land is a valuable corrective.”
The New York Times
The real strength of No Man’s Land is the sheer diversity of the voices it offers, especially those from fronts often overlooked or considered peripheral in the United States and Britain. Both beautiful and ghastly.”
Library Journal
★ 09/01/2014
Ayrton has achieved something very rare and powerful in this book, a brilliantly edited collection of fiction written about World War I from 47 male and female writers representing 20 different countries and speaking with great eloquence about the human condition and the madness of this war. In effect, we get to see firsthand the birth of the modern age that the war ushered in—the terrors and uncertainties; the dreadful technologies of destruction; and the waste, carnage, and cruelty that defined this war and much of what was to come after it (nationalism, the blitzkrieg, the Holocaust). Included are authors both famous (e.g., Erich Maria Remarque, Willa Cather) and not as well known (Stratis Myrivilis, Raymond Escholier), and not one of them fails to acknowledge the pained sense of alienation and helplessness that the war created, as soldiers and civilians attempt to survive this "world catastrophe unparalleled in human history." The volume's great strength is both its cumulative effect and the power of the multiple perspectives it offers. These viewpoints, presented mostly in short excerpts from longer works, deepen and complicate our understanding of the war and provide a heartbreaking portrayal of its devastating human cost. VERDICT Essential reading for anyone interested in history, literature, or the human condition.—Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Kirkus Reviews
2014-07-01
"Fiction reveals truth thatreality obscures," Emerson wrote, a thought that underpins 46 short piecesassembled by Ayrton (The Alphabet Garden, 1995) to define the"treacherous blundering tragi-comedy" that history labels World WarI.Ayrton has drawn from writingsof major authors recognized for work of that era—William Faulkner, Erich MariaRemarque, Siegfried Sassoon—but readers seeking a new perspective will alsofind fiction set in the Balkans, Gallipoli, and among mountain campaigns whereSerbs, Croats, Greeks, Turks and Romanians fought and bled, froze and died.Most striking are pieces written by former Volunteer Aid Detachment workers,mainly upper- and middle-class women who left lives of privilege to findthemselves among shot-off faces, gassed lungs and amputated limbs in"stinking yellow water and grey-green foaming soap, with bloody bandagesand cotton wool floating in it. Suppurating, nauseating cotton wool." MaryBorden was a wealthy Chicago woman who personally financed a field hospital.Borden also worked as a nurse, and her pieces range from the melancholy to aspare dialogue script of doctors crammed into an operating tent—a lunglacerated by three bullet holes is patched, a gangrenous leg is amputated, anda man with a mortal stomach wound begs for water. Some pieces are reportorial.Some are surrealist. Others are grotesque, such as Faulkner's"Crevasse," in which marching troops plunge into a mass grave. Andthen there are the absurdist, such as Hašek's "Švejk Goes to the War."Every piece gives voice to the "timeless confusion, a chaos of noise,fatigue, anxiety and horror" that is war on the industrial scale.American readers will appreciate the perspectives of writers who focus on theexperiences of colonial troops or the celebrated German Ernst Jünger, or VahanTotovents, who explores the origins of Armenian genocide. It's a book to be read at random,too intense to digest in a single reading, but a worthy addition to any historybuff's library.
