|
I could see how this boy had very few other options available to him, makes me grieve all the more for those soldiers who get sent to war without a true choice in the matter, without a true desire to help fight the battles the governments have said are vital to our well-being.The lyrical beauty of O'Brien's prose made me cherish the images of war in ways that I would never have thought possible, while at the same time, making me a more solid hippie. This is a book that all aspiring writers should read, focusing on the importance of story to the world. Being exposed to the brutality of death, the coping mechanisms employed in order to deal with that death and gore, I am grateful that I will likely never have to become one of the soldiers for whom this is personal history. As he describes the scene of a young man, "one eye closed, one eye a star shaped hole," I was taken to the path, taken into the head of the soldiers dealing with this image, taken into the grit that can both scar and create a new man. It also sheds some light as to the ways writers can take what they know, transform it into fiction, but still leave the gravity of truth embedded in it. No, it was not a war he agreed with, not a war he wanted to be a part of, but he was also able to make me see the reality of being too afraid to *not* go to war when drafted.
Now might be the time to simply read, enter into the heart and minds of the characters and continue on the better for it. The book has been dissected and analyzed ad nauseum for years. I read this book when it was first published, seeing it primarily as a commentary on war in general and Viet Nam in particular. This time around, Viet Nam was only the stage where fears, insecurities, angst, dreams, relationships and regrets familiar to everyone were played out.
I am quite impressed. I did not realize the hard back is its second printing). You can see by the number of reviews how important this book is. (Interestingly, Amazon "said" it was shipping me a hardback; I thought I was going to get a paperback and I did. Sentimental without becoming treacly or maudlin. Previously available only as a hardback, it's now a paperback.I wanted my own copy for years, having read the author's 1979 award winner and perused the hard cover copy at the bookstore. I prefer paperbacks and have now added this one to my personal library.I consider it one of the best books ever.
It is a finely edited and carefully polished set of 22 true life stories (or chapters, as critics disagree whether to think of the book as a novel or a collection) about the Vietnam war experience by a great storyteller, Mr. We see their morals out front and open, especially that of the O'Brien character. There may be no seams between the stories and the author's own life narrative. This is a new reprint of a 1990 book which garnered enormous praise. A true life character in the story "Speaking of Courage" is tormented after the war by a need to tell his story but no one wants to hear it, except O'Brien himself, who wrote about it in a previous publication. All the characters are revealed in very effective ways as essentially human with sharply and individually defined emotions, psychologies, and intellects. That person killed himself a couple of years afterwards, presumably because it was not the story itself that he wanted told, but because he desperately needed the act of telling it as a personal purging.For O'Brien, the stories are redemptive; he is trying to purge, but the emotional depth of the stories won't let him stop.
From a literary point of view, these stories are clever, compelling, satisfying, and original; but, it is the content stands out.O'Brien puts himself into most of the stories as a character and as the storyteller of events experienced by a small group of infantryman who are bit players, at most, in a geopolitical conflict way beyond their control, influence, and even comprehension. He cannot live otherwise than by telling these stories. They are so provocative (for O'Brien) that even characterizing them as truth or fiction becomes an emotional and philosophical conundrum. We see the war through the eyes of barely post teenage grunts who have to deal with fear, death, and the enormous discomforts of jungle warfare while trying to keep somewhat desperate ties with the saner worlds of family, girlfriends, and back home.These soldiers are essentially doe-eyed youthful innocents being used as pawns by people and forces way beyond them and without any comprehension or even objection. For O'Brien, the telling of the these tales is his way to deal with what he's seen and done in the insane environment where he was placed 30 some years before.
It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century selection, among other commendations. As a whole, the stories of these innocents are like seeing the skin ripped off of a person where it is impossible to deflect one's attention; the explicit and raw humanity exposed is riveting. O'Brien focuses on the inner lives of these "small" people. O'Brien. They are in the war because they were placed there.
Aided by being born later on a day that was not drawn in the draft lottery until far after the cutoff of call-ups, I did not go to Vietnam then or later (I've been to Southeast Asia, but not Vietnam).O'Brien (in this instance, I'm pretty sure that the narrator character and the author are unified) says that "story truth can be truer than happening truth." I'm not entirely convinced by this, considering Philip Caputo's memoir "A Rumor of War" the best book on the US ground-level experience in Vietnam, but fiction allows clearer narratives than reporting what happened. The strongest stories, however, are riveting, including the three set mostly in Iowa and Minnesota -- "On the Rainy River," "Speaking of Courage." "The Lives of the Dead -- plus "The Things They Carried, "Spin," "How to Tell a True War Story," "Church," "Ambush."The book, whether it is a novel or a collection of stories, has attained canonical status and sold more than two million copies. It took another president from Texas deployed a new generation of youth in service to ill-considered warmaking venture that I started reading Vietnam (including autobiographical fiction from those who fought the far better-armed and -fed US soldiers and marines under US air cover)."Going After Cacciato" was a bit too much hallucinatory for me, but I was hammered by the grief and rage and sense of impotence in the stories of "The Things They Carried." The only lapse of verisimilitude for me was the hourly wage at a Worthington meatpacking plant ca.
The stories about a platoon that is "Going After Cacciato" follow each other in a single chronology (however hallucinatory the stories are, and some are very hallucinatory). Though late to reading and being impressed by what O'Brien wrote and how he wrote it, I think that it is, indeed, a great book. The very last story in "The Things They Carried" reaches the farthest back before the A Company platoon deployed to Vietnam, and increases my sense of unity in reflecting about loss across the stories originally published over a span of about fifteen years and collected in a book published twenty years ago.There are some very short (2-3 page) ones that don't do much more than proliferate might-have-beens.
Both when my fellow southern Minnesota-raised writer Tim O'Brien published his National Book Award-winning "Going After Cacciato" in 1978 and his related collection of stories "The Things They Carried" in 1990, I was not interested in reading about the nightmares of trying to hold up a corrupt, unpopular regime in South Vietnam. "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen."It is easier to sign off on verisimilitude than on whether the collection of stories with the same characters and met fictional discussion about story-telling is an elliptical novel. Next stop "Lake of the Woods."
1968. "The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over," O'Brien wrote, and different versions compete even in one head.
|
