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| The Things They Carried (Flamingo) | 
 enlarge | Author: Tim O'brien
Publisher: Flamingo
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £1.80
You Save: £6.19 (77%)
New (27) from £2.94
Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 15015
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0006543944
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780006543947
ASIN: 0006543944
Publication Date: July 25, 1991
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
Possibly one of the very best... February 25, 2008
A truly, truly remarkable collection of short stories. I am not generally a short story reader, but the title so intrigued me I had to give it a go. I was stunned. I was left speechless. The prose is wonderful, and the sheer simplicity with which he brings about an understanding of what it was like to be an American teenager, and then suddenly, almost inexplicably, you are in the middle of Hell. I cannot say enough good things about this book. I truly, truly, truly loved it. Wonderful!
Truer as Fiction July 20, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Is it possible to be honest when the truth is unknown, and which truth anyway would we choose to tell if we knew it?
The Things They Carried is a book about the Viet Nam war, a war aided by GI Tim O'Brien. It is not a collection of short stories, it is not a novel. It is imagined truth trying to tell a story bigger than itself, and succeeding through the medium of fiction.
O'Brien writes with a simplicity that is profound. He is a magician pulling - not rabbits out of hats - but meaning from experience. After college he was summoned to fight a war in a foreign country. He didn't believe in the war and he didn't want to die and he struggled to decide on how to react to his draft papers.
He went to war.
Viet Nam becomes a kind of mist, partly collective, partly personal. O'Brien mixes fact with story telling to carve some kind of route through the mist. Places - Song Tra Bong, Quang Ngai, My Khe - become recurring characters, characters who seep into the landscape:
'He was under the mud and the water, folded in with the war, and their only thought was to find him and dig him out and then move on to some place dry and warm.'
(In the Field, p 163)
The reader joins O'Brien in his mist and the mist begins to make sense. It makes the sense of dimly remembered personal and collective truths. We go to war with the writer, recognising the humanity within through the horror without. We don't have to leave our armchairs to do this. It is, partly at least, the war of retaining a sense of honour in a world that mocks honour; a war with ourselves that can only be survived by the slow process of separating what is true from what is false. We are encouraged to observe the illusion of fact, to find the story. But to honour also our need to distance ourselves from human acts of inhumanity - our own and those of others.
On occasion O'Brien attributes acts of shame to others only to confess later it was his weakness that cost the life of a friend. He is honest enough to lie, sensitive enough to reflect and ultimately brave enough to share his darkness in public. Here, the process involved in being weak to be strong, in finding power through honesty, unfolds with grace - like the petals of some carnivorous plant.
'"Takes guts, I know that."
"It wasn't guts. I was scared."
Kiowa shrugged "Same difference."
(The Lives of the Dead, p 223)
It is tempting to seek to classify this book into some containable genre, something to make the journey feel safer. It is a war story; it is autobiography; it is fable or horror. It is all those things and therefore it is more. Quietly, The Things They Carried melds the concept of genre into insignificance. The book is a tour de force. Relax into it, read it as an epic poem - above all listen to it. This is a profound book telling the truth in the only way humans can understand truth - through fiction.
Funny as well as sad April 19, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Somewhere between a short story collection and a novel, somewhere between fiction and memories is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a wonderful book about a terrible war.
O'Brien takes us into the life and minds of soldiers in a fashion rarely witnessed in fiction. Most characters in the book come alive and some of them the reader gets to really feel bad for when things go wrong. It's also a book with a wonderfully funny, in a strange way, story like the Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, a great story on it's own. It is also placed in the right order of stories in the book to have maximum effect, both on it's own and in a way to make the other stories more effective. We also have notes that can shock the reader. "Speaking of Courage was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa." (Page 155)
An amazing book July 6, 2005
25 out of 25 found this review helpful
THE THINGS THEY CARRIED is a powerful memoir in the form of a collection of short stories about the haunting life of Tim O'Brien and a company of soldiers in Vietnam.
The Things They Carried was a thought-provoking and inspirational book. This highly vivid description of the Vietnam War kept me reading through the night until the last page. I am not a big reader but once I picked up this book I was reading for hours! This book gives a taste of Vietnam for those who were not there. The interesting thing about this book is that it tells the true life of the soldiers giving us a better idea of what the soldiers went, and what war really is. One comes close to understanding how the feelings from going to war, leaving their families behind them, losing loved friends, killing another man, and how the pathetic nature of the foods and sleeping conditions; all traumas of war that can change a human being forever.If you like war novels, then this is a must read. Even if you don't like war books and think they're all the same, read this and you will reconsider. One thing for sure is that you will appreciate the style of writing and the way it makes you think. You still get to laugh despite the deaths and destructions. The soldiers seem to taunt life with life and death games. Written with a deep message and in a manner similar to CHEKHOV AND TISI JANVIER, this anthology of related short stories about the Vietnam War portrays men who faced their fears, confronted danger, came out alive but became scarred for life.
BRUTAL HONESTY January 15, 2002
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
The first thing that grabbed me about O'Brien's collection of short stories about the Vietnam war, was the stark realism. This is an exploration of the human condition rather than a war story per se. O'Brien's prose is lathered with irony and a distinct sense of hopelessness pervades his eloquent narrative. Emotions are laid bare, and the psychological turmoil caused by the war itself are presented with veracity and aplomb. This is realism of the highest order. Simply brilliant
billy proctor
sunderland
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