Under Fire (along with Remarque's All Quiet...) remains for me one of the most powerful descriptions of the madness and horror of war that I've ever read. What I found most compelling in Barbusse's novel is the author's use of language in describing "the tortured earth" during a passage in which French troops are being shelled. The author introduces you to a score of characters whom you really get to know as you experience the unspeakable conditions under which they are forced to survive and fight. One hesitates to use the term beautiful in referring to descriptions of carnage and agony but I can think of no other way to convey the power and, yes, poetry of his words. His language is clear-graphic-the "scenes" are enormously vivid. It would, in the hands of a competant director-one with vision- make a great film particularly if done in black/white! A great book written with sympathy towards those victims who are asked to participate in the insanity of war.

Amazing, sweeping, a black and white word picture of the nightmare of trench warfare. I read this book in the Univ. of Arizona library in stages from 1997-99 not for a class, not for a term paper, but merely BECAUSE IT WAS THERE. Barbusse is a poet when the shells are falling at 3:00 am, he is a priest when an appeal to Mon Dieu is needed to save a friend horribly wounded. How someone could compose something this flowing, with this kind of rhythm, even as the Hun is rushing another muddy trench, is amazing to me. He must have attained some altered state, some semi-divine detachment, when composing the lyrics that actually describe a nightmare you can't wake up from; or what most other people called World War I. Yet so many will have nothing to do with this type of literature, it's about war and therefore turns off automatically the majority of readers, and essentially all of the female type. But that is their loss - the book ends with a gasp at hope no matter how dark the sky; there is a ray of sun peeking through even the Germanic cloud of Destruction. This can be an example for all of our hopes whether one is surrounded by an actual battle or a conflict of one's own making.

How can a novel be based on a man who peeps on other people through a hole in his apartment wall? Read this book to find out. The protagonist is an isolated man who presents a great many of the problems of modern existentialism in a nutshell. Colin Wilson used this book as the starting point for his "Outsider", and one can easily see why. The protagonist is a perfect example of the outsider. Unfortunately, he is not a particularly intelligent or perceptive outsider, and this detracts from the book. but on the whole, a great analysis of the human condition in the modern world.

Although sometimes considered as an erotic work, this is in fact a philosophical novel about solipsism.
This theme is treated brilliantly: a man looks through a hole in a wall in a hotel room into another room, where he observes scenes about life and death, like sex or a dying person who insults a priest.
He always asks himself: is this real or are these scenes only in my thoughts? Does the world outside me exist? His answer is negative: I am alone.
It brings him on the brink of schizophrenia. Even science cannot help him. But ultimately he chooses to continue to live, because there is still a sparkle of hope. To find out why, you should read this novel.
An ambitious, not always well understood, but brilliant work about an essential philosophical problem.

Some books are smuggled into our lives in a way that almost begs supernatural interpretation; thus did I unintentionally come across Henri Barbusse's novel: 'HELL'(LeEnfer,Paris,1908); suspiciously placed in my path as by divine intervention. So profound are my affections for this short 250 page book that I cannot forsee the same fate for myself had I not been challenged into taking "the left-hand path" this devil's pitchfork on the road of life signalled. Our narrator is the very man Colin Wilson used to define "The Outsider" in the opening pages of that influential book; but OUR NARRATOR WHOSE NAME APPEARS NOWHERE is much more than a reference point for late 20th century Art Historical/ Cultural Studies. He is witness to the unspeakable visions of the individual that any sensitive, intelligent young man would see if he were to cast one dark, unholy, voyeuristic eye and the other a tender, humanitarian, all-recording lens that must saturate itself in tears if it is to continue to bear looking any longer at the horrible woes of humankind. Our narrator has barely any hope left, all he has in the world is a hole in the wall in which to view, the world; more specifically, Paris around the turn of the 20th century. He suffers from the existential metaphysical horror of existence so prevalent in young men of his disposition, who are more concerned with deep matters of the soul than with eeking out a life of dull servitude amongst the financial fanfare of society. It is no surprise Robert Baldick, translator of J.K.Huysmans': "Against Nature"(A Rebours, 1884) chose to translate Barbusse's early novel, although vast differences exist between the two they are of like spiritual & reclusive considerations of new ways of experiencing the world on a much more intimate level than Naturalism or Realism; they process their thoughts to an intensive, hitherto unrealized degree that is considered "Decadent" by many. The things our narrator sees are everything that most young men are fascinated about: sexuality being high on the list. But it is not just tender LESBIANS devouring each other's venusian mounds that one must encourageingly suffer: ADULTERY, evoking feelings of jealousy in an innocent bystander(?)made of an eye peering at two lover's guilty squirmings; guilty, but like beauty, only in the eye of the voyeur. CHILDBIRTH is seen in all it's horrifying surgical mystery, bloody as only murder can compare, in which a slimy monster is squeezed out of a hole small as the one our narrator sees through; a hole usually reserved for sublime violation in the mind of a young man. DEATH plays a dirge on our narrator's heartstrings that marks the novel with an "X" on its forehead, setting it apart from other more common scenarios, giving our young man "steeped in the infinite" a chance to further his evolutionary spiritual career in that he may play for a while at being an old man's guardian Angel. These examples should suffice to give those attracted, with perhaps voyeuristic tendencies and a love of immortal Literature an idea of the scale and depths probed by this all-seeing eye in a motel wall. The language is entirely of late Symbolist/Decadent persuasion, poetically lyrical yet realistic and focused in its descriptions; Octave Mirbeau and J.K. Huysmans come to mind. But the book singularly occupies the celestial heights of voyeuristic literature, it has no comparison and is second to none. Its eye is an all-knowing, all-encompassing specimen. I believe it is the only novel of its kind Barbusse wrote, who went on in the surrealist years to be involved with political activities, bearing no evidence of further work in this artistic/spiritual realm in which he wholly succeeded in by birthing this literary only-child of its kind.