My rating:
add to my books
Loading...
Fatal Light
A young medic goes from his sleepy West Virginia hometown to the soul-searing terrain of the Vietnam War to learn about American "innocence" in a war that brings new horrors each day. Later the medic returns home to confront his shattered personal history and the mysterious human capacity for renewal. "Of all the many books written about the war . . . this o...more
Paperback, 210 pages
Published
April 1st 2009
by Santa Fe Writer's Project
(first published 1988)
There is a good chance some of your friends read this book. Sign in to see!
sign in »
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
This book is currently not featured on any Listopia lists.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
57)
"It is that living, while it goes on, can seem like light itself, a perpetual slide of morning out of dawn's rare edge of perfect watery blue, light that leans and spills from a space in the sky between mountains and a roof of storm cloud, light escaping a doomed past to live again above our heads in passing glory."
Fatal Light is my first experience with Vietnam fiction. I specifically signed up for War thru the Ages Challenge again this year because I had no e...more
Fatal Light is my first experience with Vietnam fiction. I specifically signed up for War thru the Ages Challenge again this year because I had no e...more
"According to the author's introduction to this new edition of Fatal Light, the novel was written following a decade of poetry, prose poetry, and short story writing. Currey's experience in poetry and short-form fiction is apparent in the novel's structure, in which vignettes - some no longer than half a page, some poetic, some more traditionally narrative - link together to form a portrait of a young man's experience serving in the Vietnam war.[return][return]While I found the novel movin...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
I had never heard of this little book or its author before receiving it as a gift a few years back. Waited some time and finally threw it in a travel bag to take along on a train ride home for Thanksgiving, 2011. Not more than a few pages in I became it was clear that Curry was a serious author. I was very surprised by the strong quality of his prose, which at times read like a stream of conscious, yet this book is lean. Complex without being silly. Curry includes some of the classic Vietnam War...more
In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien wrote at length about truth in war stories.
"A true war story is never moral," he wrote. "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 ... often in a true war story there is not even a point."
By this yardstick, Fatal Light rings true: here we have no rectitude, o...more
"A true war story is never moral," he wrote. "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 ... often in a true war story there is not even a point."
By this yardstick, Fatal Light rings true: here we have no rectitude, o...more
3 and a half actually. Good Vietnam/post-Vietnam book. A little too poetic at times, but it's up there with Dispatches and some of Tim O'Brien's Vietnam books that aren't THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, or Kent Anderson's Nightdogs, which may be the best Vietnam book ever written that isn't actually set in the war. This one's not as HEAVY as those, but still packs a serious punch, especially the parts that take place after the protagonist makes it back home.
Richard Currey‘s Fatal Light is an unusual novel in which an unnamed narrator provides readers with an inside view of what it is like to be a draftee before, during, and after the war. Beyond the bullets, the Viet Cong, the mines, and the brutality of war, soldiers had to navigate a culture they didn’t understand, malaria, injury, and unexpected relationships. The prose is sparse and the chapters are small, but each line, each chapter can knock readers over or back into their seats after putti...more
Vietnam book about going to war, enduring hell and trying to come home. Written by a NM Physican's Assistant who had been a medic in Vietnam. No mystery, no heroism, just trying to survive one day at a tiem, putting one foot in front of the other and then trying to fit back into a worlld you left behind. Great stuff.
Very well put together. Shockingly gorgeous images of wartime. Currey is able to turn phrases that will stun you.
This classic novel of a soldier's experiences in Vietnam and his return home has recently been reissued. Prior to writing this novel, Currey wrote poetry and short stories, which shows in the brief chapters, the episodic narrative, and the poetic prose. This soldier's story is well written, deeply affecting, and more relevant today than I would like it to be.
Gabriel Benjamin
marked it as to-read
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
american-literature,
military
Mark
added it
Amy
added it
John D. Baskerville
added it
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
