Andersonville [Hardcover]

This book is astounding in its scope, detail and depth of characters. The way Kantor spins the intimate lives of so many individuals around the central thread of the Claffey family and the prison... It is simply amazing. I see many of the previous reviews complaining that this was a difficult read. I did not find it so, but the writing IS like thick rye bread or dark heavy beer. You aren't going to be able to plow through 300 pages a night. The writing is saturated with detail and will drift for chapters into recollections or musings of various characters. People who are linear thinkers probably will have trouble with this book, because this is not just a story about Andersonville. It's a giant timeless snapshot of humanity.

This novel is just too long. There are beautiful, compelling, heart-wrenching,and inspirational moments. Kantor at times demonstrates a fine ability to evoke certain images.
The problem is that not every episode is captivating and the reader often has to wade through pages and pages before reaching the "literary payoff". At times I wondered if I would ever finish the novel. A decent editor could have trimmed this book by 200-300 pages and I believe the novel's impact would not have been changed. I do recommend reading this novel, but with reservations.

MacKinlay Kantor won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1955 for his novel "Andersonville", an epic account of the notorious prison camp in Southwest Georgia which operated from February 1864 till the end of the Civil War. An Iowan, Kantor seems to have strived to be impartial, but there are not-always subtle parallels between Andersonville and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The superintendant of the stockade was Henry Wirz, a Swiss who was educated in Berlin. His heavy accent is emphasized throughout the book; and near the end Kantor has written a haunting scene in which a Union officer arrests Wirz, the latter protesting that he was only following orders. (I'm not revealing plot elements here, it's a matter of historical record: in 1865 Wirz was executed as a war criminal.) The horrors of the prison are contrasted with outside digressions. One digression is the prisoners' memories of happier times in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and in what is called York State. Kantor's aim is to make the prisoners real people, not just faceless statistics. (Indeed, Chapter LIV is a young fifer's full life, from first impression to an out-of-body experience.) Another digression is the existence of residents in the vicinity of the stockade, whose lives are blighted by the neighboring corruption. The most important of these is Ira Claffey, a fictional plantation owner in his fifties, who has lost three sons in the War and whose wife goes mad with grief. (After the fall of Atlanta, Claffey, presuming on a slight acquaintance with Jefferson Davis, attempts to reach Richmond to plead for the cause of the Andersonville inmates, but he is stymied by the looting panic of retreat.) Many readers have commented on Kantor's decision not to use quotation marks. I was slightly disconcerted in the opening pages; but as I became more deeply involved with the book, I found that I had no difficulty discerning which were quotes and whose they were. It also gives the narrative a tougher, more documentary tone, appropriate for such a grim topic. Grim it ineviatably is. There's a skillfully ironic episode in the second half in which a young Rebel veteran discovers a Union escapee. The Southerner has lost a leg, the Yankee a hand, both at Gettysburg, and there's an eerie outside chance that they may have maimed each other. Their relationship and its effect on their lives is symbolic of what's happened to their severed country, and Kantor's artistic story makes Andersonville a microcosm of a disasterous conflict.