Bookworm, no. 83

Lou Braibant reviews a new translation of “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Marisa Grizenko reviews Ruby Smith Díaz’s “Searching for Serafim.” Poetry by Lindsay Mayhew. Inside the March issue.

Feb 18, 2025

It’s Getting Louder Again

All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
Edited and translated by Katharina Rout
Broadview Press
348 pages, softcover and ebook

In 1918, the Canadian Army liberated my coastal hometown of Knokke-Heist, Belgium, sixty kilometres north of Ypres. Each year on Armistice Day, when windowsills get draped with the Maple Leaf, I’m reminded of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, from 1929, which depicts the horrifying trench warfare that preceded our liberation. Nearly a century later, Katharina Rout has produced the first English translation in thirty years of the classic anti-war text, intended as “an uncensored All Quiet in North American culture.” Given the “increasing incidence of military conflict” around the world, explains the professor emeritus from Vancouver Island University, “it is as timely a novel as any.”

Paul Bäumer, a nineteen-year-old German student, and three of his closest friends are “packed off from the same grade in school straight into the war.” With a misguided vision of patriotism, shaped by propaganda, and a fear that their parents and teachers would otherwise call them cowards, the teenagers initially man the front lines in the summer of 1917 with optimism for the German cause: “But the first dead body we saw shattered this belief.” In the eighteen months leading up to the armistice, Paul endures countless horrors and reflects on the barbarism that has overcome his company: “We have become dangerous animals. We don’t fight, we defend ourselves from annihilation. We don’t hurl grenades at people—what do we even know of people right now?”

In her introduction, Rout traces Remarque’s turbulent life and wartime service, the book’s complicated history, and its critical reception. Elsewhere, she includes archival imagery, selections from the author’s correspondence, and excerpted reviews. Nazi critics would argue that All Quiet on the Western Front was “a contrived view of the war through the lens of a toilet seat.” But Remarque received thousands of letters from grieving mothers and from veterans who found the book “liberating because it illuminated their own situation.” Readers will certainly find this new translation illuminating for a host of other reasons.

—Lou Braibant

The Lifeguard

Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes
Ruby Smith Díaz
Arsenal Pulp Press
144 pages, softcover

Vancouver’s first official lifeguard, Joe Fortes, patrolled the beach at English Bay, saved countless lives, and taught generations of locals how to swim. He was so adored that his funeral procession in 1922 drew thousands of mourners.

That Fortes was a Black man from Trinidad adds a layer of complexity. “How could he have been so loved by so many in a time of active segregation and white supremacist violence?” asks Ruby Smith Díaz in Searching for Serafim. The book seeks to understand Fortes and his place in early twentieth-century Vancouver through an engaging blend of research, speculation, and personal reflection. While much about his life can never be known, Díaz uses these absences in a generative manner that recalls the “critical fabulation” pioneered by the scholar Saidiya Hartman, where narrative is used to explore and redress archival gaps. For Díaz, “a fellow Afro Latine in Vancouver,” the first step is to call Fortes by his real name, Serafim, since “the ‘Joe’ Fortes we know today has largely been created by the white colonial imagination.” Why, she asks, would a man raised among Spanish and Patois voices sound like a Black Southerner, according to journalists at the time? Likely for the same reasons that “Old Black Joe,” a lament “written to honour enslaved Black communities in the United States,” was sung at his funeral.

Díaz traces Fortes’s biography, from his days as a young man in Liverpool to his adult years in British Columbia. She reaches back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and to the theft of Indigenous lands, then returns to the present, where bigoted incidents and attitudes echo earlier injustices. In Searching for Serafim, the legacy of one heroic lifeguard unearths a more interesting, if complicated, story about immigration, race, and memory. It’s a welcome contribution to Vancouver history.

—Marisa Grizenko

Poet’s Corner

Starfish

My tender limbs were removed
from the salty wet.
The whip of dry air, a pucker
on yielding skin.

Yet, with pacific suckling kisses,
i thanked god to not be caught
by barbed nets and transgression.

Under bloodied shadows, i shrank
acerbic and chalky.
Beached into exhibition.

Some kinds of sick are called holy.

Inside tough exoskeleton is
flood and branch. In this wish,
we all drown.

—Lindsay Mayhew is a spoken word artist and author from Sudbury, Ontario. Find more of her work in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada, on newsstands now.

Inside the March Issue

“When my son was five, he came home from school one afternoon looking surprisingly glum. I wondered if he’d had a dust-up with another kid or been chastised by his teacher. Before I could inquire, he looked at me mournfully and said, ‘Something terrible happened today.’ He paused dramatically. ‘Charlotte died.’” Sandra Martin on the enduring delights of children’s books, with Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading.
Pearl Eliadis reviews Richard Moon’s The Life and Death of Freedom of Expression.
Kevin Jagernauth reviews Dead Writers, a collection of four novellas by Jean Marc Ah‑Sen, Michael LaPointe, Cassidy McFadzean, and Naben Ruthnum.
And much more!