The 3 best books by Joseph Heller

The literature of Joseph Heller was born with that seal of maturity of the writer already back from everything. This is how one discovers in the narrative of this American author a taste for reduction to the absurd, for humor, for unfiltered criticism. Nothing to do with other illustrious pilots passed into literature as Saint Exupery o James salter in the end more transcendent because of his own vision of literature as a field of greater substance and not a spittoon where to release the bitterness before it rushes back down the throat.

There has to be everything. There is always time for one kind of literature or another, the one that sublimes or the one that ridicules everything. In Heller's more than strange, deformed vision there is a brutal realism passed by that notion of someone who no longer expects a solution or improvement and only gives himself over to the mission of exposing miseries. Because one thing is not to communicate with millstones and another is to have the opportunity or the desire to write about it with the conviction of offering the most necessary lucidity for dull consciences.

It's like that old saying "someone had to do it." In the literature of the American 20th century, Heller assigned himself the task of beginning to present the gray areas of the American dream, confident in the fact that America needed each and every one of its citizens to preserve precisely unsuspected balances...

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Joseph Heller

Trap 22

And Heller arrived and wrote a classic ... Surely he was only thinking of writing a tragicomedy of his days between the flashes of surface-to-air missiles, bombs and the holy eggs of the great dispatch soldiers ...

During World War II, in the hospital of the American base on a tiny Italian island, a bomber pilot named Yossarian pretends to be crazy. He wants to avoid losing his life at all costs on his next air mission and return home. Why the hell is everyone trying to kill him from below? he asks himself every time he drops a bomb. Yossarian tries to prove that he is crazy but falls into the "catch 22": an absurd and perverse military rule that states that those who claim insanity to avoid going to war are the sanest. And if you're sane, you're healthy, so... You have no choice!

Originally published in 1961, Trap 22 is without a doubt one of the funniest and most celebrated masterpieces of all time and a cornerstone of the American literary tradition, which has earned it a listing of the best books of the XNUMXth century. . The reader will be immersed in a flurry of absurd situations and delusional dialogues that underline the stupidity of war and of the human being. And is that "hell we are, and have always been us," says Laura Fernández in the prologue. If I was going to describe hell, it would be a maddeningly funny one. Because that's how ridiculous the world is. […] For this humanity to try to learn something about itself. "

Trap 22

Something happened

Behind all acid criticism, in all desire to ridicule or make satire, we always find the disenchantment of the narrator on duty in his endeavor to unravel what it is that moves us to stumble over and over again in our means, complexes and guilt ... Social success it is the worst goal of modern society full of vices. This is the story of a breakdown.

Bob Slocum is an enviable man. Executive and successful, he has an attractive wife and three children, a "friend" and, because of his position, a wandering harem. However, something has happened. The possibility of being demoted in his hierarchy, the fear of not reaching the top where decisions are made, and the hatred of his superiors, mixed with the breakdown of his family life, constitute a constant affliction for Slocum.

Portrait of teenage artist, old

It wasn't personal, James Joyce. Heller could take Dorian Gray as a reference. The thing was to rescue that point of transcendence of the work that opens about art and its meaning or its sources. Portrait of the Teenage, Old Artist is a moving and fascinating foray into the mind of an artist who reflects on his life in search of a source of inspiration. An exceptional, moving and captivating look at creativity, with all its moments of hopeful illusion and agonizing disappointment.

Eugene Pota, novelist who like himself Heller He has become a legend, a cultural icon thanks to his first novel, he seeks an argument for his definitive work when he perceives the decline of his days approaching. That first novel marked his literary career. From that moment on, all his work was meticulously dissected by critics, and, with the exception of some short-lived success, was considered deficient.

In his search for a plot he turns to his wife, his agent, his editor, his former lovers, even his doctor. Everyone brings him ideas, but none of them are convincing, to the point of being dragged down by disillusionment. In his restless struggle with inspiration, Pota, "alter ego" of Heller, delves into the "tragic component" in the lives of such writers as Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jack London, and Joseph Conrad; the havoc that early success wreaked upon them that they later did not find in the rest of his work. By the way, between his life adventures and his failed novel beginnings, he pays tribute to his favorite authors; among others, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka and James Joyce with the title nod. Portrait of the artist adolescent, old was the last narration of Joseph Heller.

Portrait of teenage artist, old



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