Catch-22

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, 463 pages.

Heller's absurd classic about bomber pilots in World War II still resonates strongly fifty-some years (60?, I don't know) after it's release. I first read this in high school and then read it a second time decades later. While I still find it humorous, I didn't remember the depths of despair for almost all of the sympathetic characters. Nor did I remember the level of casual personal violence. It is hard for me to reconcile the lives these characters led with the real experiences of the combatants and civilians caught up in that war. When I read Catch-22 the first time, WWII and its attendant misery seemed impossibly remote. Now, though it all seems contemporary or even ongoing. The book itself, with Yossarian, Dunbar, Nately, Orr, McWatt, A.T. Tappman, and a cast of others lined up on one side and Milo, Ex-PFC Wintergreen, Colonels Korn and Cathcart, Generals, Peckham, Dreedle, and Scheisskopf on the other, careens wildly around the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean. Sometimes the Germans and their anti-aircraft gunners are the enemy, those that are "trying to kill me," but more often the war is fought all around; with the pilots, their aircraft, the Italian civilians, the whores, black marketeers, doctors and nurses, finding violence and a huge amount of senselessness swirling around them.
The introduction to the later editions includes Heller's recollections of how the book was received at the time of the publication. That was a lot of fun to read. Timeless, provocative, and precisely crafted, it is despair leavened with absurd humor.