2014 Book Review #24: The Things They Carried

[jethrien]

Title: The Things They Carried
Author: Tim O'Brien
Genre: Memoir
Thingummies: 5

Synopsis: The things soldiers carried in Vietnam, and the things they carried home with them.

Thoughts: There are good reasons that this has become one of the landmark works about the Vietnam War. It's a stunning, devastating, engrossing portrait of what it was like to be a young American soldier. It flicks back and forth, from the front to the rear to the draft to decades later, moving restlessly, unable to pause in a single memory, unable to escape the whirlpool of the worst of them. O'Brien never wanted to go to Vietnam; part of him never came home. He is haunted by ghosts, and his ghost haunts the rice paddies even as his body continues life in the States.

But it's not just the topic--O'Brien's style is mesmerizing. He crafts sentences with a care that few can match. (I originally heard of this book when it was used as an example in a writing guide.) He manages distance and immersion with equal deftness. His way with details is lush and ruthless. He is at his most poetic when he tries to convey the worst horror, the traumatized orphan, the young soldier literally blown into fragments while he watches. There's a dark humor and a quiet despair. O'Brien writes to exorcise his demons, but you get the sense that all he's done is given them new life.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

We read this in high school. I remember it well. I remember in particular his assertion that the only way to tell the truth of an experience is to tell a story about it that isn't true. And that just telling the truth didn't actually convey the truth. I always remember that, especially when I'm learning history about war.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

I also read this in high school and it has always stayed with me. I particularly remember his whole discussion about the oppression of the draft, and the line "I was a coward. I went to war."