FLOTSAM
- kaifong5
- Sep 4
- 2 min read
By
Erich Maria Remarque
If one googles books by the illustrious author of All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Ramarque, Google comes back with 11 titles. Of the 11, I have recently read 9 of them and my reviews of these are posted on kaifonglee.com. Now Flotsam is the 10th and it is the only one with a title word which few readers know what it means.
The word Flotsam has several meanings. The one suitable for this book is “a floating population of emigrants or castaways”. This description applies to the characters in this book. Set in the Europe of the late 1930s, the book describes the wanderings of a group of folks who has been deprived of their German citizenship in the late 1930’s. They wandered from country to country, crossing one border after another, always in fear of being caught. There are no dramatic scenes of fierce battles depicted in All Quiet on the Western Front, nor the frightening effects of hyperinflation in The Road Back. There is instead the message, via the wandering characters, that the seemingly small things in life are priceless, such as a bouquet of flowers, a bed to sleep on, a roof over the head, and just owning a passport.
While reading a book, I like to note down memorable quotes which relate to various human experiences. In my reviews, I noted down 4 from “All Quiet on the Western Front”,
5 from “Arch of Triumph”, and 5 from “Shadows in Paradise”. For “Flotsam”, there are the following two:
- A city seems unfriendly until you have eaten and drunk in it.
- Man is magnificent in his extremes – in art, in stupidity, in love, in hate, in egotism and even in sacrifice, but what the world lacks most is a certain average goodness.
In summary, I would not put Flotsam in the top half of the 10 books by Eric Marie Remarque that I have read. Lacking dramatic action, it takes considerable patience to read it through. However, the book drives home the point that we should consider ourselves lucky to be able to enjoy life’s small things. This is worth the price of the book several times over.
Four stars out of five stars
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