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Loading... The Things They Carriedby Tim O'Brien
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  rbiedry | Nov 6, 2009 |  Tim O'Brien's novel is highly controversial mostly because the author admits to his reader that he is faking half his stories. Might I remind the review audience that the whole point of a war reminiscent novel is to recall events, not make them up. Other than the latter and the constant cries for self-pity throughout the novel, I still favor The Things They Carried because of its tone and clever wordings however, I would suggest to O'Brien not to make up the stories which have, according to him novel, torn him in half. How can something that never happend be so detrimental? (  ) Jdely93 | Oct 26, 2009 | Ernest Hemingway (  ) luckyemmie | Oct 17, 2009 | A work of fiction that blends actual events in Tim O'Brien's life with his perception of the Vietnam War he fought in. The dedication of the book was to Alpha Company, those that survived and those that died. A very compelling read, the first I've read on Vietnam showing the cruelties of the war and the psychological effect it had on its soldiers. (  ) phoenixcomet | Sep 28, 2009 | Although depressing (as war stories probably should be) it was an engrossing work. Although it's touted as fiction, I still was left wondering how much was actually fictitious and how much was just a slightly exaggerated truth. But that's the beauty of this work - O'Brien actually TELLS the reader that this isn't a true story, but it's absolutely true. He leaves you wondering and feeling uneasy and feeling a mix of different emotions, but none of those emotions are disappointment in his writing ability or boredom in reading the stories. ( ) Sean191 | Jul 8, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0767902890, Paperback)"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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War is something that always stays with you, no matter how long it has been since your return. The images, the death, the destruction, and just the sheer brutality of it all. We learn that many, such as Norman Bowker, simply can't handle it. But at the same time, O’Brien wants us to know that war is like a drug. Some people get caught up in it and lose all sense of clarity. Old rules are no longer in effect and old truths are no longer true. In war you lose your sense of the definite. War is hell, but also so many other things such as mystery, terror, adventure, courage, discovery, holiness, love, and hate. I think that O’Brien wants the reader to realize that although war is awful, there is so much more that goes into it than what meets the eye.
A fantastic read. Yes, I read it as part of my AP English summer assignment and went into it dreading the fact that I had committed to such a class. I am so glad I got a chance to read such a story. This is the kind of book that I would read for pleasure (if I had the time). Some of its content is rather explicit, so I would recommend it to older teens, especially those interested in war/history.