Editors Reads Verdict
The most atmospheric of Remarque's novels — a portrait of Paris in 1939 by an exile who understood that the city was living its last months of freedom, written with a love for the city that the knowledge of what was coming makes almost unbearable.
What We Loved
- The Paris of 1939 — the cafes, the hotels, the streets of Montparnasse — is rendered with a precision and love that makes the coming occupation devastating by implication
- Ravic is one of Remarque's finest protagonists: a man stripped of everything who has found a way to remain human
- The revenge plot is handled with unusual psychological realism — it is not cathartic but ambiguous
- The love story between Ravic and Joan Madou has a tragic inevitability that Remarque handles without melodrama
Minor Drawbacks
- The pace is deliberate — Remarque is more interested in atmosphere and character than in plot mechanics
- Some readers find the ending too dark, though this is consistent with Remarque's consistent refusal to offer false consolation
Key Takeaways
- → The stateless person — without papers, without legal existence — is the characteristic figure of the twentieth century
- → Paris in 1939 was already living under the shadow of what was coming — the gaiety was real and the doom was real simultaneously
- → Revenge, when achieved, resolves nothing — the officer is dead but the damage he caused cannot be undone
- → Love between exiles has a particular intensity and a particular fragility — both parties are already people who have lost everything once
| Author | Erich Maria Remarque |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Fawcett |
| Pages | 480 |
| Published | January 1, 1945 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Classic Fiction, German Literature, Historical Fiction |
Arch of Triumph Review
Ravic has no legal existence. His real name — a German Jewish surgeon of considerable skill — is known only to a few; officially he does not exist in France, having entered without papers after his escape from Gestapo custody. He operates on wealthy Parisians under the names of French physicians who take the fees; he lives in a cheap hotel in Montparnasse; he drinks Calvados and reads and waits for a war that everyone knows is coming. In the meantime, he pursues the Gestapo officer Haake, who interrogated and killed his former lover and destroyed his former life — not from any plan but because Haake is in Paris, using a false identity of his own, enjoying the last months before he will be able to operate openly.
Remarque wrote Arch of Triumph in 1939-1940, in American exile, while the events it describes were happening. The novel was published in 1945, the year the war ended, and the Paris it depicts had by then been occupied, liberated, and changed. The Paris of 1939 that Remarque renders — the Scheherazade cabaret, the hotels of the Left Bank, the particular quality of autumn light on the Seine, the conversations of exiles in cheap restaurants — is a portrait of a civilization in its last months of apparent normalcy, written by someone who knew it was the last months and could not say so openly to the characters who lived it.
Ravic meets Joan Madou outside a bridge on the Seine, a woman about to drown her despair in the river, and they fall into the kind of love that exiles fall into: intense, provisional, unable to make claims on a future that neither of them controls. Joan is an actress, beautiful and self-absorbed, drawn to both Ravic and to the more glamorous life that a successful actor offers her; her oscillation between them is not cruelty but the behavior of someone who has not yet understood that the future she is choosing between will shortly become unavailable.
The revenge, when it comes, has the quality of all Remarque’s resolutions: not triumphant but conclusive. Haake is dead; the wound he represents in Ravic’s life cannot be healed by his death, but can at least be marked. What follows — the German invasion of France in June 1940, and the moment when Ravic and the other foreigners are rounded up for internment — is the historical framework arriving to collect what has been deferred. The arch of the title is the Arc de Triomphe, the monument to French military glory, beneath which Ravic repeatedly walks — and which watches, indifferently, as the city it presides over falls.
Our rating: 4.3/5 — Remarque’s finest novel after All Quiet on the Western Front, and the most complete portrait in literature of Paris in its last months of freedom before the German occupation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Arch of Triumph" about?
Ravic, a German surgeon living illegally in Paris in 1939, practises medicine under a false name and pursues the Gestapo officer who destroyed his life. Remarque's wartime novel was written in American exile and captures the atmosphere of Paris just before the German occupation with the precision of someone who knew the city and understood what was about to happen to it.
What are the key takeaways from "Arch of Triumph"?
The stateless person — without papers, without legal existence — is the characteristic figure of the twentieth century Paris in 1939 was already living under the shadow of what was coming — the gaiety was real and the doom was real simultaneously Revenge, when achieved, resolves nothing — the officer is dead but the damage he caused cannot be undone Love between exiles has a particular intensity and a particular fragility — both parties are already people who have lost everything once
Is "Arch of Triumph" worth reading?
The most atmospheric of Remarque's novels — a portrait of Paris in 1939 by an exile who understood that the city was living its last months of freedom, written with a love for the city that the knowledge of what was coming makes almost unbearable.
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