Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried

For the record, I don't traditionally like the 'war memorial' genre. I also tend to dislike books that others gush over, although that could just be a case of inflated expectations.

However.

Tim O'Brien's memoir about his experience in the Vietnam war begins with an item-by-item list of all of the things that his company carried - literally - during their time in Vietnam. My initial skepticism of such a trite literary conceit was rather spectacularly undeserved, though, a fact that began to dawn on me as O'Brien moved smoothly through physical items into items of memory or experience that these men carried with them. This theme carried through the entirety of the book, though unobtrusively so, gently nudging me every so often to think about how each story would weigh on each character.

Perhaps that was the most intriguing thing about the book, though. O'Brien is an openly unreliable narrator whose self-awareness turns that unreliability into a virtue. In fact, the pugnacious nature of his unreliability seems itself to be a literary device, showing that one of the things he carries is his desire to have experienced all of these things, so that he can legitimately write about them. At the very least, he carries the weight of his obligation to tell the stories that so many of them cannot.

In terms of structure, the vignettes have a dreamlike unreality to them that reflects the surreal quality traditionally applied to the Vietnam era. I can't be sure if this is deliberate, but whether premeditated or not, O'Brien's reflection of the dazed sort of horror that everyone seems to feel about Vietnam is the perfect foil for his uncompromisingly unreliable storytelling. The loose structure of the vignettes seem to be O'Brien's way of showing how his memories of that time are both disjoint and fluid - each story is vividly distinct from others, yet as the book progresses the narrator obfuscates what happened to whom and when, and dead characters pop back to life, then are dead again as he jumps back and forth in time.

Though at times O'Brien's "don't romanticize this, nothing I say here is true" theme can be a bit grating, the book is beautifully constructed and written. O'Brien strikes the difficult balance between impactful emotional content and sappy self-indulgence, and the result is a book well worth reading.