（自分メモ）戦争について

Atlantic Monthly [US] January - February 2015 (単号) (2015/01/09) 不明 商品詳細を見る

これから読もうと思うAtlanticの記事をメモ代わりに置いておきます。１万後近くの長い記事です（汗）

The Tragedy of the American Military
The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.
James Fallows
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015

Words checked = [10192]
Words in Oxford 3000™ = [86%]

メモついでにNYTのカクタニさんのイラク戦争小説の状況をまとめてくださった記事も載せておきます。全米図書賞のRedeploymentもイラク戦争でしたね。

Human Costs of the Forever Wars, Enough to Fill a Bookshelf
DEC. 25, 2014
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Words checked = [2958]
Words in Oxford 3000™ = [81%]

女性による戦争ものやイラク人による小説も紹介してくれています。確かに“You join the infantry to become a man”という表現はAmerican Sniperにもありました（笑）

More than a decade into these wars, books representing a growing array of perspectives are being published. There are still far more war books by men — and not only because they outnumber women in the military. As Kayla Williams, a former Arabic linguist and intelligence specialist in the Army and the author of two tough, funny and affecting memoirs (“Love My Rifle More Than You” and “Plenty of Time When We Get Home”) observes, people frequently say, “You join the infantry to become a man,” but no one says, “You go to war to become a woman.”

As for Iraqi-born writers, Hassan Blasim (“The Corpse Exhibition”) and Ahmed Saadawi (“Frankenstein in Baghdad”) — who have used Kafka-esque scenarios and magic realism to convey just how surreal and nightmarish day-to-day life for Iraqis has become — are gaining recognition in the West.

So far, fiction about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has tended to have a chamber music quality, using short stories, fable-like allegories or keyhole views (from individuals and platoons) to open small windows on those conflicts.

Why has there been no big, symphonic Iraq or Afghanistan novel? For one thing, “War and Peace"-like epics take time: Tolstoy published that novel some five decades after the French invasion of Russia, and Denis Johnson’s Vietnam novel, “Tree of Smoke,” appeared more than three decades after that war. With Vietnam — as well as with the AIDS crisis and the Holocaust — there has been a distinct trajectory, with reportage, personal testimony and more documentary works leading the way, followed by fiction that grows increasingly panoramic and experimental as the event recedes in time.

The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror (2009/08/27) Dexter Filkins 商品詳細を見る

Forever Warのようなすぐれたルポタージュは出ているが、イラク戦争を扱った文学作品の大作はまだでていないと捉えているようです。原因の一つとして小説作品として昇華するための時間がまだ経っていないことをあげています。カクタニさんの記事を読んでForever Warを読みましたが、イラク戦争は10年以上も経つんですよね。。。