Das Boot (the Novel)

Having finished reading Günter Grass' Danzig Trilogy , it appeared that I hadn't gotten enough of reading about the events of WWII as seen from a German point of view. With that in mind, I placed Lothar-Günther Buchheim's novel, Das Boot into the queue. Reading it would come immediately following Hannibal and Me by Andreas Kluth. Ironically, Kluth tells stories (in his book on Hannibal) of his grandfather's brother, who was also a German living through WWII.

I had originally seen the movie based on Buchheim's novel when it was released in the earlier 1980s and I look at it as a truly classic film. It's been years since I've seen the film, so even if it should follow the book exactly, I knew that what I was about to read would be new to me.

What can I say about the novel that hasn't already been written? Daryl Carpenter has written an excellent review for subsim.com. There are more than 200 reviews for the book at goodreads.com with the vast majority of reviewers giving it either a 4 or 5 star rating out of a possible 5.

The novel is very realistic, and one can feel the tension, anxiety and claustrophobia present in a U-boat patrolling the Atlantic during the Second World War. One reviewer at goodreads.com called Das Boot the Moby Dick of submarine novels. I couldn't have said it better.

The way the story unfolds, you know that the man telling the story has to survive - otherwise the story could not have been told in the first person. Never the less, I was anxious to learn how the narrator could possibly make it. 

Although a work of fiction, Buchheim draws heavily on his own experiences during the war as well as the stories of persons he actually knew.

Although the book drags on in places - it took much longer to finish than I anticipated - it is an amazing book which I give two thumbs up.