The Things They Carried

The news from Iraq has been really grim this week. At least 22 marines killed in a war premised on lies. All this was in the back of my mind as I listened to The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. O’Brien served in Vietnam and is a fabulous writer and story teller. It’s an odd book: not a book of short stories but a group of stories. It reads like a memoir but isn’t; reads like non-fiction but isn’t. Is it truthful? I think it is. Fiction is often more truthful than non-fiction, I think, because in non-fiction the writer has to carefully document each event, and leave out those which can not be documented. But in fiction, the writer can tell stories based in truth but transformed by perceptions, opinions, beliefs, memories, fears, shame, consequences, and a host of other things that make a story more real than reality. In any case, it’s a great book, although some of the stories are pretty gory and difficult to take. It’s a book that I think would have been better read than listened to. O’Brien’s writing is so good that I kept thinking, “I want to remember how he said that,” but there’s no going back (easily) in an audio book… no re-reading a sentence to fully understand how the writing itself enhances the story.