Bookies! Smash Book Review - Angel Down by Daniel Kraus. Did Krauss Miss The Mark Or Did He Nail It?

Описание: Angel Down by Daniel Kraus tells the story of Private Cyril Bagger ... a lazy, avaricious and selfish man whose stock in trade at war are marked cards, loaded dice and other tools to swindle his fellow soldiers.

Bagger finds himself unable to extricate himself out of an order to go into the "No Man's Land" between German and American lines of battle in order to silence a soldier who has been screaming for a number of days. When he belly crawls to the soldier, he finds, instead, an angel wounded and helpless.

What happens when an avaricious soldier like Bagger comes into possession of an angel? The angel's pure goodness radiates out of it in the form of blinding light. Krauss asks an interesting question about the nature of man. Is it in man's nature to exploit a good for his own selfish interests? Or, is it the nature of man to be converted by that good and look for the betterment of all instead? This isn't a spoiler review, so you'll have to read the novel.

Kraus' prose is stark, and no other writing style would make sense for a novel set in the trenches of a battlefield in World War I France. For those of you who cannot stand any deviation from grammatical norms, be forewarned. Kraus tells his story of the internal monologue of good versus evil, in one 304 page long sentence. I believe the intent is to graft the reader into one, long thought relating to the questions noted above. In my opinion, the device works splendidly. Grammatical experiments be damned! You should easily adjust.

I rate Angel Down with 4.25 starts out of 5. Given the subject matter, the deeper questions explored, and the grammatical devices used to build tension and hold the reader in a vice framed by those deeper questions, it appears unlikely that you've read a novel like this before. It works, and the novel is very interesting. I easily finished it in about a day and a half.

I hope you enjoy this Smash Review. With every Smash Review, my goal is to buy the novel on the day it is first published and immerse myself in it until completely read so that I can give you my best review as soon as possible. Hopefully, I can put some excellent art into your hands. At the very least, I can direct you away from wasting your time and money on books that are just boring and not worth your effort.

Enjoy the novel. I sure did.

Bear

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