The Things They Carried
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Product Description
Tim O'Brien's modern classic that reset our understanding of fiction, nonfiction, and the way they can work together, as well as our understanding of the Vietnam war and its consequences, The Things They Carried now has well over a million copies in print.
But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. --Alix Wilber Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. They carried shameful memories. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."
A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so.
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Product Info
- Author
- Binding
- Paperback
- Dewey Decimal Number
- 813.54
- Edition
- 1
- Format
- Bargain Price
- Label
- Mariner Books
- Manufacturer
- Mariner Books
- Number Of Items
- 1
- Number Of Pages
- 256
- Product Group
- Book
- Product Type Name
- ABIS_BOOK
- Publication Date
- 2009-10-13
- Publisher
- Mariner Books
- Studio
- Mariner Books
- Title
- The Things They Carried
- ASIN
- B004TE6FRA
- Sales Rank
- 857
- Provider
- Amazon
- As of
- May 21, 2012, 12:55 am
