This is a Victorian murder mystery with a lesbian romance.You will probably love it, but even if you don't, it's highly unlikely you will have read aThis is a Victorian murder mystery with a lesbian romance.You will probably love it, but even if you don't, it's highly unlikely you will have read anything else quite like it....more
I enjoyed this a lot. Okay, maybe "enjoyed" isn't the right word seeing as there is death, torture, misery and a lot of general unfairness... but it wI enjoyed this a lot. Okay, maybe "enjoyed" isn't the right word seeing as there is death, torture, misery and a lot of general unfairness... but it was a compulsively readable book that made me grateful that I was born in the time and place I was. And it was an interesting education on Chinese history, politics and culture....more
The Things They Carriedreads like a confession, which, I suppose, in many ways it is. War is a theme in so many books, be they historical fiction, meThe Things They Carriedreads like a confession, which, I suppose, in many ways it is. War is a theme in so many books, be they historical fiction, memoirs, alternate histories... and I've certainly read my fair share of them. But stretching my mind back over the years right now, I struggle to recall one that has affected me quite so much. Perhaps I would put it on equal footing with Drakulic's "S" - a heartbreakng novel about the treatment of women in the female war camps during the Bosnian war. But the main difference between the two is that this one is autobiographical. However, unlike a lot of non-fiction I've read, it is also written beautifully, lyrically and powerfully. Telling the horrors, the friendship, the fear and the shame of the Vietnam war with brutal honesty. This is one read that I may never have found without the 1001 book list and it is one I believe fully deserves its place on the list.
The book is split into what some may call short stories but are really all episodes of the same story. A sad story that encompasses the many different aspects of soldier life during the Vietnam war. But it's also about the befores and the afters. How did a young, blood-quesy liberal, who had taken a stand against the war while at university become a soldier who carried out brutal orders and killed without thinking? There is an awfully bleak sadness to this tale that lingers in the very existence of the novel - the fact that O'Brien still finds himself writing war stories long after the war is over. That there are memories and confessions tied up inside him, begging to be told. Despite the stunning prose and vivid re-imagining of these stories, readingThe Things They Carriedis a little bit like watching someone break down. The author talks at one point how embarrassing confessions are for the people who have to hear them and yet he admits his stories must be told, anyway.
But this also isn't a difficult book. You might expect it to take some effort but O'Brien knows exactly what he's doing as a writer. It's easy to get caught up in the frightening world he is sharing and realise you've read half the book when you only sat down to read a chapter. The stories seemed to fly by in an array of horrifying colour, I was utterly mesmerised from start to finish. And I want to stress something about that: this is not a gratuitous torturefest. Which is perhaps why this story feels so real and powerful. If O'Brien merely wanted to inflict upon us a book that was like a car crash, he could have painted more gory pictures of disemboweled soldiers but the real battle for O'Brien has always been a psychological one. And the things they really carried weren't the ammunition, the pictures and letters from loved ones, or lucky talismans, it was the fear, the guilt and the tremendous loss of innocence.
When it comes to the Vietnam war, things like blame and pity and accusation are thrown all over the place in a million pointing fingers. One minute it's the evil Vietcong setting booby traps to slice up teenage American boys, the next it's evil American soldiers massacring villages and pouring napalm on screaming children. This book is about neither of those. O'Brien sees both US soldiers and Vietcong as young men thrown into something they didn't understand, both victims of a war that was out of control. If anyone gets the blame, it's the highers ups, the politicians and state leaders, people who sit in an office and order teen boys to go out to fight and die. The citizens who shake their heads at the cowardice of a young man who refuses to fight for his country, even when they have no idea why he's fighting.
A surprisingly powerful book that will stay with me for a long time....more
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