Mais le problème des souvenirs, c'est que l'on ne peut pas les oublier. On prend son inspiration là où on la trouve, c'est-à-dire dans sa propre vie, à l'intersection du passé et du présent. La circulation des souvenirs alimente une rotative dans votre tête, où ils tournent en rond pendant un certain temps, puis l'imagination se met bientôt à couler et les souvenirs se confondent et repartent dans un millier de directions différentes. En tant qu'écrivain, tout ce qu'on peut faire, c'est choisir une direction et se laisser porter en formulant les choses comme elles viennent à nous. Voilà ce qu'est la vraie obsession. Toutes ces histoires.

Nearly 40 pages into my used copy of The Things They Carried I found a large post-it note with the words "Start here" scribbled in small print at the very top. It's the point where the novel, which till then seems to stick to the premise of viewing the Vietnam War by examining the things U.S. soldiers carried. The writing comes back to these items again and again, grounding the story in pictures and mementos, weapons, ammo, clothing, and small comforts like a bible, a knife, pantyhose, what have you. Some are practical, some are remembrances, but they provide some insight into the men of Alpha Company, but going into the fourth chapter it starts to lose its ground.

 

Except, after page 38, the story drifts away from these items, and from the perspective Lieutenant Jimmy Cross who was central through these early pages, and from the kind of straight war story that we know well. The story gets messy. Tim O'Brien then writes in snapshots and in framed stories that, even when the subject is usual, have a touch of the surreal. Whole chapters veer off as in "The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong" in which one character tells the impossible-seeming story of a man bringing his girlfriend to visit him at his station in Vietnam and her getting lost in the world of special forces -- first asking questions, then tagging along, then participating in missions, and eventually dropping off the grid altogether. But as the subject matter gets more outlandish, the narrator "Tim O'Brien" won't give us neat answers on what is true. Some very believable scenes he reveals to be fiction, others he insists are true, others are true but didn't happen to that person, or the person had a different name.

 

"A true war story is never moral," we are told on page 68. Then on the next page, "You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you." Then on page 71, "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen," then "In many cases a true war story cannot be believed," and still later down the page, "In other cases a true war story cannot be believed." Reality becomes a non-Newtonian fluid, appearing clear before us, but slipping away whenever we try to hold it too tightly.

 

From a literary studies angle, it may be interesting to model what is supposed to have actually happened to "Tim" and what has not, but following that post-modern rabbit-hole down to try to tell what happened to O'Brien is a fools errand and lead you far astray from the important lessons of the novel [and that realization may lead you to one of the important take-aways from this story]. 

 

I often thought back to Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut while reading The Things They Carried. Something in the tone and the way reality seems to shift under your feet while reading it. But where Vonnegut let that distortion play out in fantastical ways, with aliens, time travel and other science fiction elements, Tim O'Brien keeps our eyes on the war the whole time. Truth, time, beauty, and reality are distorted but in a way that is much more familiar in the way we understand memory and especially traumatic memories. "Tim" isn't taken away to a far away planet with a beautiful movie star. He is Vietnam, even when there is a discordant, impossible, beautiful image like that of Curt Lemon stepping back so that the sun catches his face and flying into the vines and white blossoms, blown by the explosion of the landmine he stepped on.

 

The Things They Carried is a meditation on war, on youth [and youth lost] and on storytelling, whether through novel, gossip, or your own memories. O'Brien's war stories, to whatever degree they are factual, feel truer than most, and closer to home. He never tries to educate on the 60s, the war, or the government, though it's hard not to walk away with some thoughts on these matters. The war for him and us readers is what the dozen men [give or take] of Alpha Company see, hear, and feel. It's death and loss and a connection unlike just about any other on Earth. 

The things they carried by Tim O Brien is a collection of twenty-two stories chronicling the author's recollections of his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. About one third ways through the book I realised that this account was not entirely based on fact and that some of the stories were fiction and I did initially think that this was going to affect my ability to understand and gel with the characters and stories but I think the book was so well written that for me it seemed as if I was seeing the war through O'Brien's eyes and this overcame my need to know exactly what was fact and what was fiction.
I found this in my audio library and to be honest I did very little research on what exactly the book entailed because the narrator's voice was so amazing that I just got stuck in and what I great book I stumbled upon.

A few of the stories shocked and saddened me and one in particular will stay with me for a long time(On the Rainy River). I found the story (The Dentist) funny and was glad there was a little humour in there among all the sadness.

I am really glad I read this book and I hope to purchase a copy for my bookshelf, I can absolutely recommend the audio version of this one as the narrator was excellent.




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They carried malaria tablets, love letters, 28-pound mine detectors, dope, illustrated bibles, each other. And if they made it home alive, they carried unrelenting images of a nightmarish war that history is only beginning to absorb. Since its first publication, The Things They Carried has become an unparalleled Vietnam testament, a classic work of American literature, and a profound study of men at war that illuminates the capacity, and the limits, of the human heart and soul. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Amazon, Goodreads

 

 

 

The Things They Carried follows the varied life stories of men with one American troop during the Vietnam War. Through the items they each carry on their person -- from letters, to choice of personal effects or luck tokens to the supplies entrusted to them -- the reader is given insight into each of these men. The luck tokens in particular, or the glimpse into the source of a soldier's superstitions was especially interesting and sometimes eerie. Like the guy whose choice of "lucky rabbit's foot" was actually the severed thumb of a Viet Cong teen male that had been killed. 

 

The novel becomes a study in what makes these guys tick as individuals, not only from a soldiering perspective but also simply as a man away from the fatigues. The reader is given a front row seat to life on the battlefield, the daily blend of terror, joy, and boredom thinly laced with anxiety. I thought it was an interesting choice to write in a character that started out as a conscientious objector who fled to Canada but then ended up in service because he couldn't go longer than a week under the weight of guilt. I was just imaging what the atmosphere might be, in reality, within a troop who had just a member on their team!

 

I can appreciate that O'Brien wants to give readers a realistic view of military life in the field. He doesn't pull any punches, doesn't worry about coddling the reader. I can respect that. But I still found his approach a bit heavy-handed. Sure, he shows that daily life is far from a tea party, but in some cases he made these guys look like unbalanced weirdos. Lt. Jimmy Cross especially, with his obsession over Martha, his lady friend back home. There are all these lengthy passages about him incessantly pondering on the state of her virginity. When she sends him a pebble as a token of what she sees as their separate but connected status, he sucks on this pebble?! Or what about that thought he has regarding the last time he took her out: : "I shouldv'e done something brave...like tie her up and touch her knee." WTF Jimmy. WTF.

 

That second chapter, "Love" -- anyone else read the description of Martha's tendency to distance herself from intimate moments... anyone else read that and wonder if O'Brien was possibly suggesting that Martha was asexual?

 

Oh, and what I said about O'Brien not pulling any punches? Well fair warning here for sensitive readers -- some scenes described in this novel get quite graphic and even sometimes involve the extreme harming of animals. There's talk of a guy's death in a sewage field, a live dog being detonated, and men doing target practice for sport on a baby water buffalo. There's also a pretty visual description of one soldier's pre-service job as a "declotter" -- the guy left to rinse blood and any other leftover residue from carcasses -- in a pork processing plant. Nowhere near as bad as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, as far as detail, but still quite the image the way O'Brien describes the small passage. 

 

 

It was a little confusing, the way in which O'Brien chose to write this as a sort of autobiographical fiction. Technically, he calls it a novel, but he's writing from inspirations from his own military career and he gives the narrator his name. It's only the second of his books I've read (the first being Northern Lights) so I'm not sure if he does it with all his work. I come across this style every so often and I'm not sure that I'm a fan, overall. It gives me too much of a headache to constantly try to wonder or figure out what's fact and what's fiction when authors bring their own names into the story. Just give me one or the other. {The one exception to this that I can think of is reading Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer -- he used this technique in that novel as well and again, I didn't love that approach, but I did end up really enjoying the novel}. 

 

Some might find it strange, but I think for me  the most interesting part of the novel was the story of soldier Mark Fossie's girlfriend coming out to Vietnam to visit with him for a few weeks. I thought that section was actually the most compelling because of anyone she seemed to have the most extreme shift in personality, which had me turning pages to try to understand what was happening to her and how far it was going to go. Girl got dark!!

 

I went into this expecting a certain level of grimness (I grew up with a Vietnam vet father after all, I know well how his experiences shifted our home life), but I was also hoping for something with a bit of the poetic to it. Not saccharine, just honest but with still at least a tinge of beauty to it. To be honest, I was a little hard pressed to find it here. What left me torn as a reader though, was the fact that just from a writing standpoint alone, there are some truly fantastic passages to be found in this book. So throughout my reading I would constantly find myself vacillating back and forth between "Is this a 3 or 4 star read for me?!". In the end, I have to say the rating needle pointed closer to the 3 mark. There is something to O'Brien's writing style that does seem to bring the reader in no matter what, I just seem to keep struggling to fall in love with his general plots or character development. Something in me weirdly wants to keep trying though! 

 

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EXTRAS

 

Info:

 

Per the back cover of this book:

 

The Things They Carried has won such literary awards as France's Prix de Meilleur Etranger and the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize.

 

It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critic's Circle Award

 

 

 

Every bit as masterful and moving as I had been promised it would be.