Book Review - Sergeant Salinger

 

Today I am reviewing 'Sergeant Salinger' by Jerome Charyn. This book was very kindly gifted to me by No Exit Press, in exchange for an honest review as part of a blog tour.

Synopsis:

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war - from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a 'spook,' with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell.

My review:

 I am familiar with The Catcher in the Rye, but I knew next to nothing about its author, J.D. Salinger. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined by Jerome Charyn, we follow Salinger’s journey from an innocent lovestruck young man, to becoming Sergeant Salinger, assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps and thrown into the depths of the horrors of WWII. We later encounter him as a psychologically damaged recluse with PTSD, after a stay in a psychiatric clinic and a failed marriage. ‘Sergeant Salinger’ also features a lot of real people such as Oona O’Neill, Hemmingway and Charlie Chaplin to name but a few.

The books timeline of events is from 1942-1947, it’s shocking to read just how quickly Salinger's life changed. The author really captures the brutalities of war. Even though we all know what happened during WWII, it was still shocking and horrifying to read about it in such detail. We can’t begin to truly imagine what those involved went through. It is a very sobering book. Although this isn’t a subject I would usually read, I was hooked from the first chapter and very much enjoyed this novel. Charyn is an incredibly gifted writer. I highly recommend!

Published by No Exit Press. Get your own copy Here

Thank you so much to No Exit Press, @RandomTTours and Jerome Charyn for sending me this book to review.

 About the Author:

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York. For more information about the author visit jeromecharyn.com

Please do check out the rest of the book tour!