Hilarious - | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller

My favorite novel, ever | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller

books:


	• Catch-22 Joseph Heller Simon & Schuster, 2004 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 880 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Outrageous and funny

Being a fan of M*A*S*H in its myriad of forms, I've often heard comparisons made to "Catch-22" so I finally decided to read it, and I'm glad I did. "Catch-22" has a great deal of dark humor as well as some outright silliness. It is a brilliant satire on war in general which is set in Italy during the waning days of the Nazis in World War II. My one criticism of the book is that some jokes tend to get repetitive at times.

The story focuses mostly on a U.S. Air Force squadron who go on a number of bombing runs doing their best to stay alive and do many crazy things to avoid going on more bombing runs. At the center of the crazy group is Yossarian, a bombardier who is convinced that everyone is out to kill him. Despite actions such as appearing to receive a medal in the nude, in some ways he seems like one of the most sane in the group. His friends include Milo, a bombardier who, instead of flying missions, runs a syndicate which buys and sells almost any goods you can think of; his syndicate also provides services, which at one point included bombing his own squadron! The head of the outfit, Major Major, wants to be liked by the others but they treat him badly because of his position; consequently, he avoids people, only allowing people to be sent to his office when he isn't there. Even the higher-ups prove to be nutty with Generals Peckem and Dreedle spending their energy competing against each other rather than fighting the enemy.

The book shows how insane the military bureaucracy itself can be, embodied in the concept "catch-22". One example of a catch-22 in the book is when Yossarian tries to be discharged by reason of insanity he's told he cannot be discharged because the fact he's trying to prove himself insane means that he isn't. Military silliness is also shown with how concerned officials are with seemingly unimportant things such winning parade contests and bombing a target so it makes for a nice photograph of the explosion.

Many characters come and go with several killed in combat. Heller makes all of them three-dimensional so you grow to either love or hate them. The writing contains a variety of humor - silly, intelligent, outrageous. There are several running jokes, though I feel sometimes they are overused, such as repeated explanations of how Milo's syndicate sells one kind of goods to one group in order to buy other kinds at all sorts of prices. In addition to the humorous moments, the book has examples of the horrors of war. Not everyone makes it home and nobody is the same afterward. Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to any fans of classic literature, war comedies, or satire.

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Hilarious -

Catch-22 presents an unsentimental vision of war, without romantic pretenses, glory, and honor. Instead, we find a nightmarish comedy of violence, bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness. The story is told as a series of loosely related mini-stories in no particular order. Leadership continually raises the number of missions required for the men to go home - it makes the leaders look good. The leaders pay more attention to the quality of aerial bombing photographs than the actual bombing results.

The M.D., counselor, and chaplain values each become subverted by their war duties. The doctor ends up providing useless treatments, the counselor unavailable for appointments, and the chaplain loses faith in god. All three are rewarded by the hierarchy, and none are punished.

Yossarian, the central figure, focuses on his own survival, faking various illnesses and troubled by the death of Snowden who had died in his arms on a bombing run. Yossarian discovers its possible to be discharged because of insanity, only to also learn that by claiming to be insane one has proven himself sane. That's 'Catch-22.'

Meanwhile, mess officer Milo Minderbinder gets fabulously rich through trading by his various companies, including at one point with the Germans who subcontract with him to conduct a bombing run on the American base. Eventually, Yossarian goes AWOL, is offered a court-martial or discharge - the latter if he supports the leaders' new mandate for 80 millions. Yossarian avoids the moral temptation by fleeing to Sweden.

Only someone who had spent combat time in the military could write with such devastating irony - a great book!

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My favorite novel, ever

Joseph Heller nails it. While at first it seems a chaotic mess of dark situational humor and commentary of the state of war, main characters (dozens!), and time-jumping, a wonderful pattern is found in it all. Read it through twice: first to find out why Orr was getting hit in the head by a shoe-wielding prostitute, then again to understand why there were crabapples in his cheeks. What a masterpiece!

Answer to second thing: What do you mean? There are crabapples in his hands, not his cheeks.

Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary.

At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane -- a masterpiece of our time.

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