THE REMAINS OF COMPANY D

The author resurrects the history of his grandfather and fellow soldiers in WWI. His stream-of-consciousness writing style—full of incomplete sentences—aims at verisimilitude but lacks even minimal organization. Narrator Ray Porter reads the words one at a time, unable to fuse them into a connected flow. He makes not the slightest effort to individualize the voices from hundreds of quotes, making it difficult to distinguish who the person speaking might be. Without maps and without the spellings, most English-speaking listeners would never divine the oft-mentioned locations of Cantigny, Soissons, and the Meuse-Argonne. The story conveys the senseless casualties of WWI but fails to impart any understanding of why it all happened. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2010]