I could have easily have given this collection 5 stars. The narrative is powerful, evocative and highly emotional, especially in the earlier stories included here. The title piece is actually my favorite, and it is cunningly put as the opening gambit in this sequence of interconnected anecdotes about a group of American infantry soldiers in the Vietnam War. Tim O'Brien claims authority of the eyewitness, uses the confessional mode, puts the focus on the human element, and combines all these to make a strong impression on my rather jaded imagination, saturated with various other written accounts, documentaries and Hollywood adaptations of the conflict. As I advaced through the text, though, I started to get annoyed with the principal voice. I still believe he tried to write an honest account of his life altering experiences at the front, but his insistent and often shrill declarations of authenticity put me in a "dost thou protest too much" mood. It's a writing technique (the unreliable narrator?) that was made too transparent in its use here, the ambiguity introduced deliberately and preemptively flagged by the author, probably in order to protect the identity of his platton colleagues or to avoid being called out for inconsistencies. To summarize: I would have liked either a non-fiction documentary approach, or a "made it all up" stance. The constant swinging between the two approaches from one story to the next served only to pull me out of the story right after a particular bit of dialogue or powerful description managed to pull me in. Also pulling me out was the habit of the author of breaking the fourth wall in order to insert his older self into almost every tale, endlessly explaining why he did this and that, and what the message is, and how we should interpret the text, as if the reader is incapable of doing it on his own, without all the metafiction. It feels like watching a movie for the first time, only with the commentary track turned on, and the director speaking over the original dialogue. By telling stories you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing what did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.I can totally get behind the idea of the redemptive quality of stories, of putting things in perspective after the confusion of actual events, of capturing the moment and the people like the silver emulsion of photographic films, and I consider O'Brien is largely succesful in his attempt to recreate the attitudes of the young soldiers and the harsh conditions of the tropical land they have come to conquer. In latter stories, the author insistence on posterity, on bringing the dead to life and offering them a kind of immortality through the medium gets heavy handed and the commentaries get lengthier than the actual content. In ordinary conversation I never spoke much about the war, certainly not in detail, and yet ever since my return I had been talking about it virtually nonstop through my writing. Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me, how I'd allowed myself to get dragged into the wrong war, all the mistakes I'd made, all the terrible things I had seen and done. or : But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, an even still, right here, I keep dreaming [them] alive. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world. and again: Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. To be totally honest, I could probably blame some of my overtly critical attitude to the book on my own bias against the American POV insistence on their own heroism and innocence, coupled with a total lack of empathy for the people and the country they are invading. Just once, i would like to read a Vietnam war story written by the other side. The Things They Carried isn't that kind of book, despite some noise about the wrongness of the war, and the one gut wrenching account of coming face to face with one of the victims from the Viet Cong ( The Man I Killed )The most important single sentence in the book for me, is about the average age of the platoon members: 19. I believe it is important to try to project ourselves to our own view on life and war and politics at that age, and not through the more cynical and circumspect lens of our older worldview (48 in my case). In the first stories, O'Brien comes through as more genuine, and more convincing than in the later stories included in this volume, where he lets his own older self (43) overanalyse every aspect of the narrative and tries to shoehorn them into a predefined moral or "war truth". One story in particular I read as a fanfiction for the M*A*S*H* TV series, and it is one where the opening paragraph is used as caution against its "truthfulness" ( Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane. This one keeps returning to me. I heard it from Rat Kiley, who swore up and down to its truth, although in the end, I'll admit, that doesn't amount to much of a warranty.). Apparently, it's also the one story that was considered good enough for a screen adaptation : Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong . It is indeed one of the most elaborate ones, featuring different characters than the usual cast of Alpha Company featured in the rest of the book: a rapid response hospital behind the lines, a young officer conspiring to bring his girlfriend over from the States, and the unexpected outcome of her emerging fascination with the jungle and with weapons of war.I already mentioned the first ambiguity that the text is based on (unreliable narrator). The other big one is about the author's attitude towards war. He presents himself as a pacifist, aware of the "wrongness" of the cause and a very reluctant draftee in the one story set before his deployment. Rather surprisingly, after reading the whole book, the major tonality of the collection is not one of horror, but one of nostalgia, a Vietnam Blues syndrome that stops former soldiers from reintegrating in a peacefull society and drags them back in fascination to the testing grounds: War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. in another place: It wasn't a war story. It was a love story. But you can't say that. All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. And the horrible truth that I got more than once, is that the narrator misses the war, craves the heightened awareness that your life might end at any moment and that you must live life fully in the present. His "truth" also has a flavor of pride, of having survived the worse, and of having been a member of some exclusivist club, one that people who remained at home cannot understand and appreciate: And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen. .Conclusion: A memorable journey, a very talented storyteller. One that I would recommend to my friends and probably re-read at one point in the future. But it had less of an impact than, for example, The Quiet American .
This is an extremely hard review for me to compile, because I am extremely conflicted on my impression of this book. And I think this reflects the very nature of the stories presented to us in The Things They Carried. They are conflicted, true, not true, true, not true. Happening truth, story truth. A maelstrom of fiction and non fiction that sometimes feels raw and poignant and sometimes feels exaggerated and fake.I gave it 4 stars, and yet sometimes I think it was 3 stars, and then at other times I think was 5 stars. 4 stars, I beleive, is the line in the sand for me. I feel the only way to review this book is to cut it into positives and negatives. I trawled through a lot of the reviews here looking for others who felt like I did about the negatives of this book, but whilst there are ample 4 stars and a few less than, no-one tells me why they dropped that star. I will tell you why I dropped mine.It comes down to fiction and non fiction. I do not like my lines blurred. In war fiction written by a vet I like to feel that it is fiction drawn on life experience. In my Non Fiction, I like to feel that what I am reading is the vets true emotions and experiences without exaggeration or lies.This book bludgeons both my categories and gives me something that is not quite either. And I hate to say it, but sometimes amidst the authors heart felt truths lies the lurking ugliness of falseness. Of exaggeration and drama created purely because the author had not much of a story to tell.I feel this book is one long feast of platitudes.And yet it is also emotionally scarring and based enough on truth to get me where it hurts.In 'the Nam', in the jungle, there was a platoon of young men. Some of them died, some of them did not. Tim O'Brien did not, and he has tried to do his best to heal and memorialise and I beleive that he has done that to effect. There are plenty of positives to this book. The writing for one is brilliant at times, the stories for their part are wounding at times. There is not a doubt in my mind that the combination of O'Brien's writing and his wounding stories will leave every reader in a different state of contemplation in the end. For me, this was a 4 star book, for you it will be a 5 star book, for the rare few it will be 3 or less.The fact is though, that this book was/is a bestseller and when you look down the list of reviewers here on Goodreads there is one thing that you should notice. It does not matter what your race, your country, your sex or age, your likes or dislikes, your favourite genre of book, this novel has something for everyone and it is being read by all sorts. That, for the memory of our Vietnam Vets, is a very good thing indeed and that, is probably the biggest positive to come out of this book altogether.
Do You like book The Things They Carried (1998)?
Let's start out with some context: I know very little about the Vietnam War, having been born in the 80's, and most of my information on the conflict comes from painstakingly-researched movies such as Good Morning Vietnam and Tropic Thunder and, to a lesser extent, whatever my high school teachers tried to make me remember from history class (thanks to my long-standing obsession with all things Tudor, I have a bad habit of just not giving a damn when it comes to American history). I do not particularly enjoy Apocalypse Now, or Vietnam movies in general. If we're being totally honest, the Vietnam War/Conflict/Clusterfuck has never really held my attention for very long. So it's a testament to Tim O'Brien's crazy talent as a writer that I found his book, which is all about Vietnam and the people who lived (or in some cases, didn't) through it, absolutely fascinating and one of the most beautifully written things I've ever read. I had read a few stories from this book before, for various English classes over the years, but I had never read the entire work. One of the things I loved most about this book was actually the structure, and the way O'Brien plays with our perceptions of fiction vs. fact. This book is fiction, that's made very clear. But the narrator is named Tim O'Brien, and because of this it's often very hard to remember that this isn't actually a memoir. O'Brien knows this, and knows that our impulse is to accept everything in this book as fact, or based closely on fact, and it's interesting that he waits until more than halfway through the story to correct us:"It's time to be blunt.I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.Almost everything else is invented. But it's not a game. It's a form. Right here, right now, as I invent myself, I'm thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough....But listen. Even that story is made up.I want you to feel what I feel. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."Here's my theory about this book: it's not actually about the Vietnam War. I mean, that's what O'Brien is telling us about in this story, but I think the book is really about writing, and storytelling. Take that passage I quoted above where he talks about the difference between story-truth and happening-truth. O'Brien is writing stories about Vietnam, but he's using the stories to teach us how to write, and how to tell stories."A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." Also, just because I really want to quote it and can't fit it into the context of the rest of the review, here's a bonus passage that I found heart-stoppingly beautiful. O'Brien is talking about a girl he knew in elementary school who died when she was nine, and how he would see her in his dreams:"Once, I remember, we went ice skating late at night, tracing loops and circles under yellow floodlights. Later we sat by a wood stove in the warming house, all alone, and after a while I asked her what it was like to be dead. ...'Well, right now,' she said, 'I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know. I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.''A book?' I said. 'An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do it wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.'Linda smiled at me.'Anyhow, it's not so bad,' she said. 'I mean, when you're dead, you just have to be yourself.' She stood up and put on her red stocking cap. 'This is stupid. Let's go skate some more.'"
—Madeline
The Things They Carried reads like a confession, which, I suppose, in many ways it is. War is a theme in so many books, be they historical fiction, memoirs, alternate histories... and I've certainly read my fair share of them. But stretching my mind back over the years right now, I struggle to recall one that has affected me quite so much. Perhaps I would put it on equal footing with Drakulic's "S" - a heartbreakng novel about the treatment of women in the female war camps during the Bosnian war. But the main difference between the two is that this one is autobiographical. However, unlike a lot of non-fiction I've read, it is also written beautifully, lyrically and powerfully. Telling the horrors, the friendship, the fear and the shame of the Vietnam war with brutal honesty. This is one read that I may never have found without the 1001 book list and it is one I believe fully deserves its place on the list.The book is split into what some may call short stories but are really all episodes of the same story. A sad story that encompasses the many different aspects of soldier life during the Vietnam war. But it's also about the befores and the afters. How did a young, blood-quesy liberal, who had taken a stand against the war while at university become a soldier who carried out brutal orders and killed without thinking? There is an awfully bleak sadness to this tale that lingers in the very existence of the novel - the fact that O'Brien still finds himself writing war stories long after the war is over. That there are memories and confessions tied up inside him, begging to be told. Despite the stunning prose and vivid re-imagining of these stories, reading The Things They Carried is a little bit like watching someone break down. The author talks at one point how embarrassing confessions are for the people who have to hear them and yet he admits his stories must be told, anyway.But this also isn't a difficult book. You might expect it to take some effort but O'Brien knows exactly what he's doing as a writer. It's easy to get caught up in the frightening world he is sharing and realise you've read half the book when you only sat down to read a chapter. The stories seemed to fly by in an array of horrifying colour, I was utterly mesmerised from start to finish. And I want to stress something about that: this is not a gratuitous torturefest. Which is perhaps why this story feels so real and powerful. If O'Brien merely wanted to inflict upon us a book that was like a car crash, he could have painted more gory pictures of disemboweled soldiers but the real battle for O'Brien has always been a psychological one. And the things they really carried weren't the ammunition, the pictures and letters from loved ones, or lucky talismans, it was the fear, the guilt and the tremendous loss of innocence.When it comes to the Vietnam war, things like blame and pity and accusation are thrown all over the place in a million pointing fingers. One minute it's the evil Vietcong setting booby traps to slice up teenage American boys, the next it's evil American soldiers massacring villages and pouring napalm on screaming children. This book is about neither of those. O'Brien sees both US soldiers and Vietcong as young men thrown into something they didn't understand, both victims of a war that was out of control. If anyone gets the blame, it's the highers ups, the politicians and state leaders, people who sit in an office and order teen boys to go out to fight and die. The citizens who shake their heads at the cowardice of a young man who refuses to fight for his country, even when they have no idea why he's fighting. A surprisingly powerful book that will stay with me for a long time.
—Emily May
Powerful writing about being a soldier in Vietnam. I, personally, had a friend once who was a marine there when he was 19. He lost both legs above the knees when he stepped on a land mine. "The guy next to me died" he told me. "I killed him". He couldn't see it any other way... He stepped on the mine, his buddy died. No matter that he nearly died himself, lost his legs, his testicle, his soul, his life as a functional human being, his sense of selfworth, his ability to feel he could live in 'the normal' world and that then he lay face-down on a bed for close to a year while they tried to patch up his brutalized, shrapnel filled body. No, none of that mattered. What mattered was that he was responsible for his buddy's death.While we sat on his boat under the stars in the Caribbean, 20 years later, with the sea lapping gently at the sides, the salty tang in the air and wild burros braying in the dark, Tommy also told me all about slogging through the swamps and rice paddies with weapons and ammunition and mess kit and rations and a change of socks and...... The list went on and I forgot much of it... But Tim O'Brien reminded me of what Tommy can never forget, it is seared into his mind and body forever.A powerful book. One not to be brushed aside lightly.
—Sandy
