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The title is better known than the book and, indeed, has passed into the language. To avoid a thing you have to accept something worse than that thing: that is Catch-22. Heller writes about American airmen on a small Mediterranean island during the Italian campaign of the Second World War, but he does not work in the great American tradition of bitter realism. His approach is satirical but it is also surrealistic, absurd, even lunatic. But the aim is serious enough -- to show the mess of war, the ...