A Soldier of the Great War was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1991, Helprin’s second major novel and in some ways his most fully achieved. At over 800 pages, it is a vast, deliberate, old-fashioned novel in the best sense — a work that takes its time, that trusts the reader’s patience, and that builds toward revelations earned by hundreds of pages of accumulated experience.
Alessandro Giuliani, seventy-four years old, a professor of aesthetics at the University of Rome, misses his bus and decides to walk. A young factory worker named Nicolò walks with him, and Alessandro begins to tell the story of his life — a story that takes the entire novel (and an entire night’s walk) to complete.
Before the war, Alessandro was a student of beauty — literally: he studied aesthetics, climbed in the Alps, fell in love, and lived in a world where beauty was a subject for contemplation. The war destroyed that world — not by eliminating beauty but by revealing that beauty exists within destruction, that it is not a separate realm (art, mountains, love) but the texture of reality itself, present even in horror if one has the eyes to see it.
The war sections are extraordinary: the Italian front (the Isonzo battles, the Caporetto disaster), desertion, capture, escape, the years of wandering afterward. But the novel is not primarily a war story — it is a philosophical argument disguised as narrative, an 800-page demonstration that the beautiful and the terrible are not opposites but aspects of the same world, and that the proper response to both is attention.
Collecting A Soldier of the Great War
First edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1991): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- Without jacket: $8–$15