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| | Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04) |
 | | It is a measure of the brilliance of Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong that his prose makes palpable to the emotions such a bloody killing field as this, and the |
 | | In the opening passage of another great novel of the First World War, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, the image of pregnancy is employed in the description of a troop of heavily armed men trudging to the next killing field -- a portent of death; later, an unsought and unwanted pregnancy results in death. |
 | | Faulks, no more than Hemingway, does not attempt to make "points" in his novel, but the birth of children in Birdsong is seen always as redemptive, especially the present-day birth at the conclusion, described as it is from the perspective of the women. |
| www.rambles.net /faulks_birdsong.html (578 words) |
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