{"id":8000,"date":"2008-04-24T07:00:27","date_gmt":"2008-04-24T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8000"},"modified":"2016-06-24T13:48:50","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T17:48:50","slug":"the-books-the-things-they-carried-tim-obrien","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8000","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cThe Things They Carried\u2019 (Tim O\u2019Brien)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tttcto.jpg\"Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:<\/p>\n

The Things They Carried<\/i><\/a>\"\", by Tim O’Brien. <\/p>\n

Fiction? Journalism? Reportage? Memoir? Do we really care? I don’t. But lots of people seem to reallllllly care about those labels. As we have seen time and time again in the last couple of years with the big-fat-lie “memoir” trend. Here’s my view, which has changed over time. <\/p>\n

So James Frey made some shit up. Okay. It was fiction and we thought it was a memoir. (Not to brag or anything, but I called the James Frey thing<\/a>. I CALLED IT. Way before it came out that the book was made up, I felt his phoniness – just from interviews. Didn’t believe a word the guy said.) But here, for me, is the question: Was it a good book? Did it move you? Does it make it LESSER because it was made up? Knowing it was made up means it’s less good? I did not read the book, full disclosure, although I did read the first chapter and thought it was a piece of shit, and not worth my time. The addiction memoirs hold very little interest for me and I wasn’t impressed with Frey’s writing at all. <\/p>\n

Fiction can be “truer” than reality – I happen to think that Anne of Green Gables<\/i><\/a>\"\" or Ulysses<\/i><\/a>\"\" or Cat’s Eye<\/i><\/a>\"\" or Blood Meridian<\/i><\/a>\"\" or A Streetcar Named Desire <\/i><\/a>\"\" is SUPERIOR to most non-fiction – FAR superior, and also more<\/i> true. Give me INVENTION, give me IMAGINATION … make some shit UP. Go for it. <\/p>\n

Tim O’Brien was in Vietnam, obviously – and the same guys are featured in most of the stories in The Things They Carried<\/i>, they’re all part of a whole. He calls it a “work of fiction” and much of it reads like fiction – but he also made no bones about it that it’s based on truth. He put his own life into words. That’s what a writer does.<\/p>\n

The Things They Carried<\/i> feels almost like a diary, a sometimes hallucinatory diary, of being in a platoon in Vietnam. Sleep-deprived, hyper-realistic, surreal dreamlike imagery … It has some of the horrible poetry of Dispatches<\/i>, another classic of Vietnam literature. <\/p>\n

The stories stand up on their own in multiple genres. No wonder the book struck such a huge chord with people, then and now. It crosses genres, it can’t be easily classified. People hooked into it who never read a book like that in their lives. His writing is accessible but also gutsy, fearless, and poetic. People who don’t like short stories could get into it because they feel like mini-essays or articles. People who don’t like non-fiction could totally lose themselves in the stories told here.<\/p>\n

The title story is “The Things They Carried”. There’s no “plot”. I hesitate to even say more about it because if you haven’t read it, you really should do yourself a favor and pick it up. The power of it is in experiencing it the first time. O’Brien pulls his vision in to a microscopic level and then pulls it back into a telescope – this is the motion of the entire story, going back and forth – minutia, universal truths … The platoon troops through the jungle. What are “the things they carried?” Some of it is gear – and O’Brien goes into that in great detail. But of course some of it is NOT gear. Letters from home. Photos of sweethearts. Talismans. And then there are things that have no weight at all. Memories. Hopes. Daydreams.<\/p>\n

“The Things They Carried” is a powerful and important piece of American literature. <\/p>\n

And it makes the question “But is it true??” that is so in vogue today with similar works seem small and petty. Is Anna Karenina<\/i> not “true”? <\/p>\n

I read a review of The Things They Carried<\/i> that referred to it as a “testament” – and I think that’s pretty damn accurate. <\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt.<\/p>\n

EXCERPT FROM The Things They Carried<\/i><\/a>\"\", by Tim O’Brien. <\/b><\/p>\n

They carried USO stationery and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes<\/i>, fingernail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a week, when the resupply choppers came in, they carried hot chow in green mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a two-gallon capacity. Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecticide. Dave Jensen carried empty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection. Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank. Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself – Vietnam, the place, the soil – a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same. They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous. In the heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters – the resources were stunning – sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter – it was the great American war chest – the fruits of science, the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat – they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders – and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.<\/p>\n

\n