The Salt of the Earth, Jozef Wittlin.

[Josef Švejk]

The classic pacifist novel by a major Polish writer, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize. At the beginning of the twentieth century the villagers of the Carpathian mountains lead a simple life, much as they have always done. The modern world has yet to reach the inhabitants of this remote region of the Habsburg Empire. Among them is Piotr, a bandy-legged peasant, who wants nothing more from life than an official railway cap, a cottage, and a bride with a dowry.
But then the First World War reaches the mountains and Piotr is drafted into the army. All the weight of imperial authority is used to mould him into an unthinking fighting machine, forced to fight a war he does not understand, for interests other than his own.

The Salt of the Earth is a classic war novel and a powerfully pacifist tale about the consequences of war for ordinary men.

 

The Salt of the Earth is the first novel of an envisioned, unfinished trilogy Tale of a Patient Infantryman.

 

 

Edited 15 January , 2021 by Josef Švejk

[Dust Jacket Collector]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. It’s not a book I’ve come across before. It doesn’t seem to have been published in the U.K. The American edition dates from 1941.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Dust Jacket Collector said:

It doesn’t seem to have been published in the U.K

 

    Oh dear, another Quest for the Grail.  COPAC suggests there is an English edition .....  and it takes priority over the American. 4 UK locations suggest it is not a chimera - BL is not one. Perhaps an example of the scarcity of a book because the Blitz destroyed stocks-or,as with the British Museum it fits with the stuff they lost.

 

 

Salt of the earth / by Joseph Wittlin ; translated by Pauline De Chary.

Author

• Wittlin, Józef, 1896-

Published

London : Methuen & Co., 1939.

[Dust Jacket Collector]

Thanks, 1939 eh. That’s going to be tricky. At least it relieves me of the pressure to buy the US edition at £150!