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Loading... The Things They Carried (original 1990; edition 2009)by Tim O'Brien
Work detailsThe Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (1990)
A very moving account of Vietnam viewed through the lens of later on. At first I thought this was all a bit cliched and haven't I seen the film of this before but then the fragmentary construction, the repetitions, the endless going over the same ground got to me and I was hooked/haunted. Also a meditation on fiction, why we tell stories and how. (  ) adrianburke | May 10, 2013 |  Guaranteed to make your heart ache. If you've lost someone, this will bring them a little closer. (  ) 5hrdrive | May 4, 2013 | This book is *transparent*. It gets out of your way. The writing gets out of your way so you can have feelings, and I am fascinated by how O'Brien does this. The precision of the language is part of it -- you feel you can trust him, so you aren't paying attention to how he says stuff, you're paying attention to the content of it. ( ) cricketbats | Apr 23, 2013 | raw, eloquent, unfiltered, immensely powerful & well-written ( ) julierh | Apr 7, 2013 | I've read several of O'Brien's novels, but this collection of related short stories about the Vietnam War is his most powerful work. Indeed, it is one of the most powerful books I have read. ( ) nmele | Apr 6, 2013 |
 "Many people think this is the best work of fiction ever written about Vietnam. Some even think it is the best work of fiction ever written about war. Both are right, and they were right 20 years ago when this book came out for the first time."  "As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on, O’Brien’s powerful depictions are as real today as ever." "...he not only crystallizes the Vietnam experience for us, he exposes the nature of all war stories." Has as a studyHas as a student's study guide
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (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 Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:00:57 -0400) Heroic young men carry the emotional weight of their lives to war in Vietnam in a patchwork account of a modern journey into the heart of darkness. (summary from another edition) |
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