"Gam" by Erich Maria Remarque (essay)

In the novel "Gam", Remarque looks endlessly distant from himself as we know him from his other books. It is very sad that such a capable narrator and connoisseur of the human soul, even in the harshest conditions, has limited himself to what is happening in "Gam". That is the writer's second novel after "The Dream Room" and it clearly shows the philosophical currents through which he goes of the beginning of his career and which Gam herself discovers while meeting with different men and she see the different faces of love. The novel is short, for me it is chaotic, with too many names that are mentioned for several times. "Gam" is mildly antipathic, perhaps even a brazen and definitely superficial woman who does not stay for long anywhere and anyone. She does not have much to offer to the reader, because in her face Remarque does not depict a whole with his own characteristics, but some fragments that look badly stuck together. "Gam" is pathetic and often does not react to external factors due to laziness. She is looking for something that she can not define clearly, but the focus of that search is on different men who can never quench her desire. A trailer often uses in its face some sophisticated self-classification, which is mildly incomprehensible.

And if this incomprehensibility in the words rather prompts the reader to expect something more than the plot itself, then this is also a disappointment, as it is also missing, at least the last fifty pages. If Remarque had only developed the story from the final, it would be much better to know who Gam was, what she was and what she was looking for in life. Nevertheless, it is very likely that the philosophies brought into the novel are likely to be larger. The different types of love and the various sources they come from, however, do not contribute to its understanding, and in general, to the desire to seek it the way it is formed, because this tortuous fragmentation affects predominantly destructively both the attention and the impressions of the reader. It is only at the end of the novel that the interesting thing begins, and everything else is endless, burdensome. The book itself is not bad at all. The bad thing is that it's a Remarque book. So the disappointment of it is even undeservedly great. It is still written in his very early years of creativity, but what is its meaning? This question remains unanswered.

At the end of the book, Gam turns into what should have been at the very beginning. Perhaps at that time, Remarquewas still on his own in understanding his characters, but in any case, with Gam he made his first attempt to cast his character into the endless soul whirlpool, which he eventually succeeded to brilliantly their images. Of course, the book also has its charms. The descriptive language and beautiful words with which Remarque depicts physical pictures, as well as Gam's clothing and manners, are unbelievable and make the character particularly mystical. In the end, she appears to be just a woman in love, but she is not quite clear whether she has managed to find what she is looking for or not. The actual ending of the novel would not be of particular interest to Remarque's greatest admirers, but in fact, in its entirety, it actually refers to topics far deeper than the unbearable boring set of men's names and geographic locations.

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