Arch of Triumph

By: Erich Maria Remarque

Narrated by: Ralph Cosham

Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

It is 1939. Despite a law banning him from performing surgery, Ravic, a German doctor and refugee living in Paris, has been treating some of the city's most elite citizens for two years on the behalf of two less-than-skillful French physicians.

Forbidden to return to his own country and dodging the everyday dangers of jail and deportation, Ravic manages to hang on, all the while searching for the Nazi who tortured him back in Germany. And though he's given up on the possibility of love, life has a curious way of taking a turn for the romantic, even during the worst of times.

©1945 Erich Maria Remarque, renewed 1972 by Paulette Goddard Remarque (P)2004 Blackstone Audiobooks, published by arrangement with the Estate of Paulette Goddard Remarque

Critic reviews

"A great writer....[Remarque] is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend his language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure." (The New York Times Book Review)

Better than four stars

I was pleasantly surprised by the story and performance. Once I started, i kept listening until it was done.

A masterpiece

The detail the relevance that pertains even through todays world current events makes this book an anatomical blueprint of human nature politics and love. This book is to be enjoyed on multiple levels and the narrator is able to produce the needed ambience for you to loose yourself in it and wait breathlessly for the next step.

Classic

Remarque always get you to the bone, bringing up your own pains and heartaches.
"Fata Morgana "

Drama in a poetical form

I head a lot of good about the book and gave it a go.

I must say I am not amused. The book is okay, but I can't see what the fuss was about.

Cons:
- the recording isn't a great quality. The narrator is good, but with some headphones you can hear a slight metallic vibration that starts to annoy and is hard to ignore. It's like someone kept an empty coke can next to the microphone and it keeps on "ringing" for half a second after he has completed his sentence.
- I know it's a thing of that time, but it got annoying when everything is described so poetically. Like, everything.
- Quite a slow burn.

Pros:
+ narrator is good. Easy to follow and good diction.
+ considering the slow burn, it's still an okay story. Didn't have to stop half way through.

Another sad smile from the poet of dispair.

I'd like to correct another reviewer first. Erich Maria Remarque never wrote in English but only in German. The German original is as haunting if not more so than the splendid English translation of the novel by J. Maxwell Brownjohn, who incidentally translated many other of his works. Besides, the protagonist is a German surgeon, but he is certainly not jewish. This is important for a full appreciation of the book.

This novel even surpasses his "Drei Kamaraden" translated as "Three Comrades" in helpless tenderness and poitless loss, the inevitable legacy of every war irrespective of what some power-hungry brute says, be he a dictator or a 'democratically' elected ruffian, specimens of whom are all too common today.
Remarque's break-through came with his "All Quiet on Western Front" in the wake of the Great War, in which Europe committed cultural suicide at an intellectual level, and just over two decades later, started her material end with the rampage initiated by Hitler, the Bolshevik dictator and totally incompetent political nincompoops who led the allied nations.
This story is thus set in a Europe that still remembered her cultural shared heritage where many of her priceless cultural artifacts were still intact but soon to be bombed into smithereens. Human suffering the characters in this book endure seems to look like a last farewell to something priceless, never to reappear, for we forget, and forget.

I have unpardonably overlooked to say anything about the literary merits of this wonderful book. Obviously, its main themes are love and friendship as one often sees in Remarques other works. In spite of the world that's crumbling down around him, Ravic finds both, but the love he finds is not conventional; it is something that illumines the man from within but without what is now called a 'relationship'. This awareness comes to him on a park bench not far from where Joan now lives with her new 'lover' soon after Ravic's return to Paris after his expulsion.

Once he realises this, things happen fast. His successful use of the unexpected chance to kill his tormentor von Hake, he is reconciled with his tortured past, and the moving scence at Joan's death bed, reconciles him to his new notion of love. And so, now in harmony with himself, he could face life with a tinge of optimism without resorting to lies, hence his return to Hotel Internationale and telling the police who he really is. Interplay among these themes and the rapidly collapsing world around him, is iridescent and haunting indeed.

Repetitive emotion

An important story which almost got lost in the repetitive emotional declarations of the main character and the woman he loved the only way he could, intermittently.
She behaved in a similar fashion which became distracting

The Western Front 20 Years Later

Remarque is known for the classic All Quiet on the Western Front, which is one of the greatest war stories ever told. I liked this one as much as All Quiet.

A German doctor, Ravitch, escapes from Nazi Germany and is living illegally in Paris. He earns a living as a ghost surgeon for French doctors who are not as talented as he is. One night he meets a woman on the street in Paris, and the story takes off from there.

The characters are the best part of this novel because each one comes across as a distinct individual. You can almost visualize Ravitch, the girl he meets, the French doctor who tries to cheat him and another who defends him, his Russian emigre friend who works as a doorman at a nightclub...each one has a real face. And the narration brings this out.

And, by the way, they drink Calvados throughout the story. It's French apple Brandy with a bit of a kick to it.

great

just great. That's what I call a masterpiece! Remarque never disappoints one relying on him.

I love this story.......

I've read the book multiple times and fell in love with the characters.... I now love the audiobook. The narrator is wonderful.!!

Beautiful

Beautiful story telling, beautiful writing, beautiful love story, learning from history. I can read and reread it over and over again