world war i – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Every time I say this, I expect to get some pushback from someone, and I never do: World War I was a war that was fought for absolutely no reason at all, and every single person who died in it died for nothing. World War II is widely regarded as The Last Good War; its predecessor may have been the most wanton waste of human life I’m aware of. It was fought at a time where the technology to kill people far outstripped the technology to defend them, and every single thing about it was horrible.

Daniel Kraus, author of Whalefall, has written a book about World War I, where a group of American soldiers discover an angel dying in the mud in no-man’s-land between American and German positions. I read Whalefall when it came out in 2024, and I was surprised just now to discover that I five-starred it when I read it; my memories of it are not especially positive and I was expecting to discover I hadn’t liked it very much. I almost didn’t pick this book up, and then it won a Pulitzer, and FOMO kicked in, and to hell with it, it was cheap.

But I didn’t almost not buy it because I didn’t like Whalefall. I almost didn’t buy it because the book is structured as a single sentence, 304 pages long.

And the thing is, call me a philistine if you want, I’m generally not fond of people who try to fuck with structure too much in books. I like my narratives straightforward and my narrators reliable. I like dialogue to have quotation marks around it. I like all the text in a book pointed the same way. And I like sentences and paragraphs to be reasonable in length. I like a good long sentence once in a while, anyone who has read me for more than a few days knows that; 304 pages is Too Long.

So here’s the good news: if you have avoided this book because of the single-sentence thing, it’s absolutely a gimmick, and it’s almost unworthy of the book, to be honest. Here’s a randomly-chosen two-page spread:

You will note that there are, if not precisely paragraph breaks, certainly gaps between clauses that serve as such, and note the image break in the top left as well. The book also has chapters. Now, you’ll also notice that every paragraph starts with “and,” which you should expect to see a lot of, and all of those “paragraphs” end with commas, so technically this is all one sentence, or at least part of it.

But, c’mon. One of the reasons for paragraph and sentence breaks is to give the eye a place to rest, and the commas do that perfectly well. You will not notice, as you’re reading, that this book is one long sentence.

You will also notice that it never slows down, and it never lets up, but that’s more a function of the writing than the structure. Kraus could have sprinkled periods at reasonable places throughout this text without changing a single word and the character of the narrative itself would not have changed one whit. And, honestly, read those few paragraphs, and you’ll know whether you want to read this or not; follow that instinct.

I will say that I did really enjoy this book– it’s not on my 2026 shortlist, but if there’s going to be a book that sneaks onto my end-of-year list without having been on the shortlist, this will be it; it just depends on how well it sticks with me. It’s a better book than my recollection of Whalefall, certainly, and I suspect if I reread Whalefall tomorrow I would still think so. The sheer hopelessness of the WWI setting and the idea of saving a downed angel was a good enough high concept for a book to begin with, and the voice of the novel is perfectly matched to the setting and the characters. There’s also one other narrative trick in the last part of the book that I’m not going to spoil but which works very well; the book ends perfectly.

Well, sort of. You’ll see when you read it.

I have another Daniel Kraus book on my TBR shelf, one that just came out; he wrote a science fiction novel called The Sixth Nik, which means I’ll have read three of his books and they’ll have been from three wildly different genres. I know he’s got a ton of other books; Nik will determine whether I start seeking out his back catalogue or not.

I’m not entirely sure that my thoughts about this book are going to rise to the level of a full review, but here we go: this book is a story about (mostly) a German immigrant family in Nebraska in 1918, at the tail end of World War I, a war that, let me remind you, was fought over absolutely nothing. It’s kind of astonishing how angry reading about World War I makes me; there is an argument to be made (in another post, mind you) that it was at least one of history’s most pointless wars, and literally not a single soul who died or was injured in that war made that sacrifice for anything at all. Everyone just got involved because they were supposed to, and then suddenly we have thousands of men dying over inches in fields where the mud is so deep the horses are drowning in it. Over nothing.

Anyway.

I said a German immigrant family, mind you, and if you’re suspecting that German speakers might have faced some bigotry in Nebraska during a time when America was at war with Germany, you’d be suspecting correctly. So this book is already about a war that makes me irrationally angry to read about, then drop a load of bigotry on top of that.

And, uh, do you happen to remember what else happened in 1918? Oh, right, a global pandemic caused by an extremely contagious respiratory disease! One that people blamed on … immigrants! Or, at least, they blamed on immigrants when they weren’t pretending the whole thing was a hoax! There’s even a bit where the local doctor tells someone to wear a mask when he’s in public and he scoffs at it.

(The book was written in 2014, by the way, so this parallel was unintentional.)

Now, here’s the thing: the book is good! It’s well-written, and the plot and the characters and all that are well done. But Christ this book was hard to read, and … like, can I get away with saying that the book wasn’t annoying but reading it annoyed me anyway? And in a way that I absolutely don’t blame on the book or the author. Again, this is a good book and you should read it. Just … ignore the fact that I’m probably never picking it up again.

I’m going to be out of town for the next couple of days, as we’re going to the northern Chicago suburbs to have early Thanksgiving dinner with my brother, sister-in-law and my new nephew. There will be the standard view-from-my-hotel post tomorrow, but expect relative quiet. In the meantime, I’ll be up way too late tonight streaming Elden Ring from 10:00 to 1:00 am EST, so you should absolutely check that out.