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The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien

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May 21, 2015 Mary rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: format-audio, summer-bingo-2015

Bingo - about a subject that challenges me. yeah, more war. contemporary war. war that happened during my lifetime. I haven't read much about the Vietnam War (because challenging subject :-) but this book seems to sum up everything I thought it was...and is. the war was still "current history" when I was in college; we didn't have the personal stories and 40 years of retrospection then. I'm honestly not sure what else I can write... I know my daughter read this in high school (?!!!) and maybe it ...more

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Jan 29, 2008 Martin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2008books, favorites

"The Things They Carried" feels a little like a bunch of stories smushed into a novel. I may well have been biased by seeing on the title page all the various magazines which had previously published chapters of what became this book, but I like to think that I would have noticed it anyway. Some chapters were interconnected, the characters recurred, but the book as a whole didn’t feel like it built in any particular way to any particular climax. To be sure, it operated on a very high, consistent "The Things They Carried" feels a little like a bunch of stories smushed into a novel. I may well have been biased by seeing on the title page all the various magazines which had previously published chapters of what became this book, but I like to think that I would have noticed it anyway. Some chapters were interconnected, the characters recurred, but the book as a whole didn’t feel like it built in any particular way to any particular climax. To be sure, it operated on a very high, consistent level throughout, but it didn’t necessarily peak anywhere. Regardless, if that’s the worst criticism I can level at the book, that’s pretty great. And it’s the only criticism I can level.

I really enjoyed this book, though "enjoy" might be the wrong word. I found it to be moving, wonderfully written, and enormously readable. I flew through it, as awful and heart wrenching as much of the descriptions and stories were. In fact, "heart wrenching" might be the best word to describe the entire experience. The descriptions and situations were often horrible or disgusting (or both!), yet not so horrible or disgusting that it was at any point unreadable or beyond reasonably shocking (if there's such a thing as a reasonable amount of shock). Mostly, the book was filled with elegant and elegiac stories, as well as keen insights – psychological and otherwise – into the experience of foot soldiers in Vietnam.

The lack of "shocking" material put me in two minds:
1) I thought about how hard it is in today’s day and age to be shocked about war in general, or the war in Vietnam in particular. We’ve all seen and read so much about Vietnam, and with the current war going on, it seems easy to be inured to the misery of war. Certainly that’s a sad state of affairs, but there it is. Reading this book I kept envisioning "Apocalypse Now," for better or worse. I think we have reached (I have reached?) a saturation point culturally with the Vietnam war, where so much is reducible to the film-versions; I think of Robert Duvall saying "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning" or hear the strains of "The Ride of the Valkyries" in the background as I read. I was mesmerized by "Apocalypse Now" and "Full Metal Jacket" and others but I think that that sort of shock gets worn away over time – now I have a bit of a more ho-hum attitude towards the stories and visions of insanity, as amazing as that may be. Yet Tim O’Brien did an excellent job of not just conjuring the insanity and horror, but explaining the thought-processes, the inner lives, of the poor soldiers in the midst of it all. Explaining a character’s inner life in such compelling detail is impossible for even excellent actors like Duvall or Martin Sheen or Vincent D'Onofrio.
2) I appreciated that the book – without shying away from gore and nastiness – was more about the redemptive power of writing than the actual hard, cold facts of war. In a way that’s made most explicit by the book’s closing chapter, the entire novel (if it is, in fact, a novel) is an elegy and redemption and therapy and a compulsion. The most fascinating part of this fascinating book is the glimpse into the mind of one writer struggling with this awful experience and controlling it, redeeming it, through the writing of this very book. It’s post-modern and strange to consider while also being very very interesting. Not to mention: sad and beautiful.

Along the same lines, deciphering what is true and false, what is fiction and fact, becomes a captivating (even primary) part of the book and the experience of reading it. O’Brien plays a powerful and genuinely surprising "game" with his readers; even as I have become more than familiar with the classic "unreliable narrator" convention in literature classes, and have even written many a paper on just such an idea in college, the way O’Brien explicitly and implicitly plays with the established rules and expectations was gripping, and even shocking to me in some cases.

In all, it is a powerful book: deeply sad and troubling while, at the same time, strangely hopeful. O’Brien’s belief in, and use of, writing as a personal salvation makes for about as searing a novel – or any kind of personal expression – as possible.
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