I’m participating in the #AtoZ April Blogging Challenge 2025 and this will be my third year of joining the vibrant community that loves this one-of-a-kind creative challenge.
This year, my theme is—BOOKS THAT HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE—which means they are not just my favourite books, but they’ve also left a deep and lasting impact on me and continue to do so until this day. I’m also blogging on ’TheSkyGirlMusings‘—where my theme is THE A TO Z OF SELF CARE. Please do check it out and follow me there too, if you aren’t already. Before you leave, please leave your blog link, and I’ll be happy to stop by your blog, read your post and follow you back as well. Thank you! 
All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Today, I’m taking the poetic liberty to use the letter Q from the title of this novel for my post on Q!
There are some books that should be read by every generation. This novel, published in 1929, speaks about the horror of the World War I trenches and the senselessness of wars in general. If you were to pick up and read this book today, you’d be surprised how relevant it still is, now, as it was nearly a hundred years ago. It is that powerful and breathtaking! I’d also ask you to recommend it to others, considering that this happens to be one of the best war novels ever written.
To tell you how I came across this book, I’ll have to step back in time to my junior college years…
It was in my first year of college, that I first heard of this novel, decades ago. We were reading the War Poets that term and this novel was listed as recommended reading for our Additional English course. The War Poets were a group of poets who wrote about the experiences, emotions, and thoughts related to World War I—mainly focusing on the suffering and horrors faced by soldiers and civilians, including the broader societal implications of conflict. It was mostly about the “pity of war”, the suffering and the brutality of combat and the psychological impact of war. There was something inherently heartbreaking yet extremely emotionally stirring in the vivid imageries that people like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg created in their poetry, written in the trenches, on the battlefield. These poems were not like anything that I had read earlier. That’s how I was piqued to know more about everything that had happened during this period that lasted between 1914-1918!
One Friday Morning, I picked up this book in our college library. The next day, when I finally finished reading it, I felt as if I had literally been living on the front lines, during those twenty four hours, absorbing all the horror that my teen mind could about the war and the aftermath of it. It had so brilliantly captured the terror and the tragedy of modern warfare, in a way that few novels ever could, either before or after, that I felt something tremendously powerful had shifted within me.
Even though it’s been so many decades since that day, the haunting feeling I had then, has stayed with me through these years. It is impossible to not be moved, to not be shaken and to not shudder by the physical and the psychological impact that the war had on the young soldiers who were pulled away into the battlefield. And when the war was over, those who made it back alive, could no longer recognise themselves or their loved ones and nothing was left of their lives anymore.
Like every other war novel, Erich’s book depicts the same mind-numbing exhausting terror of the war, but it is through his conviction and vivid clarity that he manages to recreate the full impact of the war, for the reader all over again. That is where his mastery lies. As a piece of fiction, there is a brutally stark realism in this wonderfully written novel, that is both beautiful and irrevocably tragic, in the way it presents the permanent damage done to those who fight in the wars.
The story gains even more authority in the context of the loss of life in wars, that still rage in the world today.
In fact, very few anti-war novels written since then, can ever come close to matching this unsettling book and it is doubtful, if any will surpass it, either. This is a book that remains a literary legacy and one that continues to shape discussions on war and its consequences for years to come.
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If you’d like to read the rest of my A to Z posts written for the #AtoZAprilChallenge2025, then please click here to read on.