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seeceeread's review
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
💭 "He was caught up to his hips in the jaws of disaster, yet he could feel, and think, and understand. But not act. Perhaps understanding in itself implied defeat."
Kaikō opens with his journalist narrator in the jungle alongside a few hundred men under American command. He is called back to Saigon and languishes for weeks, alternately numbed and jolted by quotidian poverty, competing war metaphors, hotel air conditioning. Abruptly, he resolves to return to the war's frontline, where he finally finds an outlet for the anxious horror that has stalked [him throughout] the book.
A survivor of World War II sent as a special correspondent for Japan at the start of the Vietnam War, the author meticulously reconstructs lurid skies, French cafés, desolate Asian eateries, aimless chatter and sweaty existential dread to saturate readers. I succumbed to gorgeous sentences filled with aching, decay and avoidance: "The loneliness here was shabbier than anywhere I'd been and ate into one's bones like acid." Readers are caught flailing and daydreaming - though the latter may discolor into waking nightmares as he steadfastly observes, notes, names.
Kaikō's approach insists I attentively witness . . . and yet, when I had to close the book to attend to something else, I happily accepted the reprieve. It's an uneasy book, startling in its morbid beauty and facile violence.
Kaikō opens with his journalist narrator in the jungle alongside a few hundred men under American command. He is called back to Saigon and languishes for weeks, alternately numbed and jolted by quotidian poverty, competing war metaphors, hotel air conditioning. Abruptly, he resolves to return to the war's frontline, where he finally finds an outlet for the anxious horror that has stalked [him throughout] the book.
A survivor of World War II sent as a special correspondent for Japan at the start of the Vietnam War, the author meticulously reconstructs lurid skies, French cafés, desolate Asian eateries, aimless chatter and sweaty existential dread to saturate readers. I succumbed to gorgeous sentences filled with aching, decay and avoidance: "The loneliness here was shabbier than anywhere I'd been and ate into one's bones like acid." Readers are caught flailing and daydreaming - though the latter may discolor into waking nightmares as he steadfastly observes, notes, names.
Kaikō's approach insists I attentively witness . . . and yet, when I had to close the book to attend to something else, I happily accepted the reprieve. It's an uneasy book, startling in its morbid beauty and facile violence.
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