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With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who made life and death for his amusement.

I think my grandmother would've liked Three Comrades. She may have read it. She passed in 2003 and I often miss her. The ranks of my rogues gallery of family contained only one reader and Stella Short was that and certainly something else. I'd like to think she died with a book in her lap.

Three Comrades is a melodrama about survivors of the Great War discovering the extent of their personal damage in the depressed cauldron of Germany in the late 1920s. This isn't an exploration of material poverty but one of irreparable moral damage. Spirit (Geist) died for these men. What is left but hard drinking and fast cars? There is always love. but such has a terminal cost on this stage. There is no great wrenching of ideas here but the affairs remain palpable, even visceral.

I thought today about Sarah Churchwell and her book on Careless People in the Gatsby. Perhaps this reaction was global?