There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were immediate was the process of a rational mind.
Joseph Heller's brilliant satirical war novel Catch-22 is 50 years old this week, yet seems remarkably young, fit and sharp-tongued for its age. I don't re-read many books, but I've gone back to this one often over the years. It always helps me understand the way the world works. And it's funny as hell... literally.
The anniversary has also inspired people to read the novel for the first time. Chris Cox confessed in the Guardian he had owned a copy for years before finally opening it: "So did I really need to bother reading it at this late stage? Well, having arrived 50 years late to the party, I'm pleased to finally be able to answer that question with a wide-eyed, emphatic, rapturous yes."
The original New York Times review was appropriately chaotic, calling the book "not even a good novel by conventional standards," while praising it for being "wildly original, brilliantly comic, brutally gruesome... a dazzling performance" that "may make its author famous."
And so it has. In an introduction to a new edition of Catch-22 a dozen years ago, Heller recalled that after an appearance on the Today Show in 1962, he met journalist John Chancellor, the program's interim host, at a bar near the studio, where "he handed me a packet of stickers he'd had printed privately. They read: 'YOSSARIAN LIVES.' And he confided he'd been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors and in the executive rest rooms of the NBC building."
I'm reading Catch-22 again. Yossarian Lives! --Robert Gray, contributing editor, Shelf Awareness
