BOOKPATHS

Vietnam; United States

Jeffrey Brown talks with Tim O’Brien, whose “collection of stories about an American platoon, The Things They Carried, is being reissued as it celebrates its… 20th anniversary.”

Yes. I mean, the things we carry, the objects we carry say things about the sorts of people we are.

The book -- so, the book does start with the physical stuff we carry through -- through a war, not just the military stuff, but the rabbit's feet and the pictures of your girlfriend back home, and all you don't have.

And then the book tries to move into the emotional and the spiritual burdens that you're going to carry, not just through the war, but to your grave. – Tim O’Brien, New Hour Website

Vietnam

John McMurtrie interviews Tim O’Brien, whose “searing portrait of war's brutality,” The Things They Carried, has just been republished.

Q: Have you heard of soldiers these days carrying "The Things They Carried"?

A: Oh, yeah, over and over (laughs). It's one of the great joys. I mean, I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile. – from “Interview with Tim O’Brien, by John McMurtrie, San Francisco Chronicle

Vietnam

Matt Steinglass reflects on “reading Tim O’Brien in Hanoi.”

It shouldn’t have been so hard to find Vietnamese who could talk about O’Brien. He is, after all, a seminal Ameri­can novelist of the Vietnam War, and one would think his books — including'If I Die in a Combat Zone' (1973) and 'Going After Cacciato' (1978) — would be reasonably well known to Vietnamese readers. They are not. In fact, almost none of the major American novels about the war are known to Vietnamese readers; they have not been translated and published here. – from “Reading Tim O’Brien in Hanoi,” by Matt Steinglass, The New York Times

Vietnam; United States

A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo (New York: Holt, 1996; first published in 1977)

A Rumor of War is Philip Caputo’s magnificent memoir of his sixteen months, beginning in March of 1965, serving as a young Marine Lieutenant in Vietnam.  John Gregory Dunne wrote in the Los Angeles Book Review:  “To call it the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it…A Rumor of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist – and the insistence is all the more powerful because it is implicit – that the reader ask himself these questions:  How would I have acted?  To what lengths would I have gone to survive?”  A Rumor of War is a book to pick up again as a reminder.

This book does not pretend to be history.  It has nothing to do with politics, power, strategy, influence, national interests, or foreign policy; nor is it an indictment of the great men who led us into Indochina and whose mistakes were paid for with the blood of some quite ordinary men.  In a general sense, it is simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them.  More strictly, it is a soldier’s account of our longest conflict, the only one we have ever lost, as well as the record of a long and sometimes painful personal experience. – from A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo

Publisher’s Website

Vietnam, Australia, United States, etc.

Patricia Cohan talks with Nam Lee, whose well-received book of stories, The Boat, was released this week.

“’I do believe that you can never know yourself, let alone the person next to you, let alone the person halfway across the world,’ he said, ‘yet at the same time, I believe there is nothing like fiction to fully thrust you into someone else’s consciousness.’” – from “Stories to Explore Someone Else’s Skin,” by Patricia Cohan, The New York Times

Vietnam; United States

Patriots : The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides, by Christian G. Appy (New York : Penguin, reprint 2004)

Christian Appy remembers the Vietnam War with an oral history, a “final public record.”  Voices from both sides are represented, including political and military leaders, poets, writers, peace activists, war hawks, former government leaders, and ordinary Vietnamese and United States citizens, each offering insights into the longest war in U. S. history. Patriots : the Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides is essential reading for an understanding of both then and now.

I don't have much bitterness.  Well, I don't think I do.  I just wish that none of it ever happened--for everybody's sake.  It was a bad political mistake.  Have you been to the Wall?  I was there in '85.  I guess that made me feel the worst that I had felt since I'd been home.  I sat right in the middle of it, right at the ‘V’ of it, and run my hands up a ways on it.  All those names.  And then we went from end to end and picked out some that got killed in our outfit.  I felt them.  Spelled them out even.  Each letter.  I sat right there and just tried to think, 'Why did all these people die?'  The majority were my age.  Their lives and their families all messed up.  What was gained from it? –  George Watkins, in Patriots : The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides, by Christian G. Appy

Related Websites

Christian G. Appy’s Website

Publisher’s Website

Vietnam

Jane Perlez writes about the ancient “Chinese-like script, known as Nom, used by classical Vietnam poets and philosophers, government officials and religious leaders,” and the American poet, John Balaban, who “is leading a drive to revive the script.” in the New York Times.

“At a gathering of international linguists in the city of Hue earlier this month, [Balaban] introduced four young Vietnamese 'font carvers' who are working at digitizing the script. A nonprofit foundation created by Mr. Balaban for the preservation of the script has compiled a Nom dictionary. It is a collection of 20,000 characters, which he says can be more difficult to master than Chinese.” -- from “Deciphering the Code to Vietnam’s Old Literary Treasures,” by Jane Perlez, New York Times

Vietnam

In the New York Times, Matt Gross writes about his search for “The Saigon of Marguerite Duras.”

“…as I discovered over the course of a few days last fall, trying to retrace some of her narrative, her world has largely survived 75 years of near-constant upheaval.” – from “The Saigon of Marguerite Duras, by Matt Gross, New York Times