revues of buddy don: red cavalry

thays four grate riters frum the soviet era of russian language literchur: Mikhail Bulgakov who writ a grate book name of Master and Margarita; Boris Pasternak, witch ye probly saw the movie they made frum his famus book name of Dr. Zhivago; Aleksander Solzhenitsyn who wrote numerous grate books includin Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago; n finely, thays Isaac Babel, witch he writ Red Cavalry.

i herd bout Red Cavalry frum Eric over at Straight White Guy, witch he recommended i read it after i writ bout readin good soldier švejk. thatn wuz a verr funny take on military life.

taint the case with red cavalry, witch tiz made outta stories writ by issac babel when he was a war correspondent travelin with the red cavalry durin the russian civil war twixt the reds n the whites. his assinement tuck him in to poland whar he wuz able to see at verr close range jes how war kin be a odd mix of the ridiculus, the gruesum n the cruel. each of the stories aint no moren about as much as ye kin fit into a newspaper column, witch they usually run twixt 500 n 2,000 words. taint a hole story all strung together, but as ye read each of the lil stories, the bigger tale emerges. ye git a lot of odd moments.

in one of the furst stories in the book, the narrator is billeted in the home of a jewish fambly, witch thay wuz a cuple of women thar n a nuther feller asleep turnt tords the walls. the narrator has bad dreams, so one of the women wakes him up n sez she wonts to move im to a nuther corner of the room on a counta how he's kickin her papa in his distrubed sleep. turnt out the feller facin the wall wuz her papa.

She raises her thin legs and round belly from the floor and pulls the blanker off the sleeping man. An old man is lying there on his back, dead. His gullet has been ripped out, his face hacked in two, and dark blood is clinging to his beard like a clump of lead.

tiz a tipicull endin fer the stories in the book. tiz often the case whar ye go frum everday boredum to grisly revelayshun of whut war leaves behind.

tiz hard to ride in the red cavalry with isaac babel, but tiz near impossibull to turn away frum it. he makes ye see how bof sides in the anarchy of war kin git to whar they do thangs we call atrocities. tiz one of the thangs leaders dont lack to tell folks whenever thar wurkin up the argument fer goin to war. one thangs fer sartin: ifn ye read too minny books lack red cavalry, ye aint a'gone be sprized by no pitchers frum abu ghraib.

a nuther thang to cunsidder is how brave isaac babel wuz. he wuz verr famus in the u.s.s.r. even tho he wuz ritin the truth as he saw it n that truth wuz not sumthin joseph stalin wonted folks to know. he had im a home in paris with a wife n fambly, but he bleeved his place wuz in his home of russia, witch he went back thar even tho he knew twuz dangrus. then in 1940, he wuz disappeard into the state prison system, witch tiz bleeved he wuz executed. twuz lack the endin to one of them stories in red cavalary.