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briandice's review against another edition
5.0
In the whole of human history, I am of the extremely small percentage of males that did not fight in a war nor had my life changed as a result of one. I am extremely fortunate to have been twice lucky: born both where and born when. So whether it is a truth-seeking need to understand the sadness that countless men and women have had to endure, or it is some atavistic genetic tugging that keeps leading me back to these stories, I am addicted to the threnody of War.
Although I will read almost any non-fiction book on war that is recommended to me, it is fiction based upon events that really resonates. If you've read Vonnegut, you can chart his growth as an author through his first few books as he is circling around the main event - until he finally deals with his experience in the fire bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book that changes the reader because Kurt was changed by war. It's not a rational transaction. But neither is life.
Going After Cacciato is a book that has the capacity to re-wire the filters of a reader. The Vietnam War is the setting, but the individual wars suffered and fought daily by the soldiers is the narrative. The action follows a squad of men and their quixotic chase after a fellow soldier gone AWOL with plans to hoof it all the way to Paris from Indochina. As readers we become as changed as the soldiers on their journey. To explain further would be to ruin the magic - consider this great quote on the back cover of my edition, taken from a New York Times review: "To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales."
Virgil C. Dice, Jr. Ready for action.
My father was 26 years old when he was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He had just graduated with a masters in music and had planned on a career as a concert pianist. He and my mother planned on getting married as soon as he finished his graduate program - he petitioned his Congressman to change his enlistment date so they could keep to their plans. Dad never shared much about his experiences, but he did tell me that his deferment saved his life - the base where he was stationed was overrun a month prior to his arrival. In 1997 I made a trip to visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. I saw families and friends of fallen soldiers search for their beloved on the wall, watched them make a keep-sake of that name with a scrap of paper and rubbed charcoal. I took a picture of the book of names to note the fortune of the skip from Robert Floyd Dice to Anthony Dicesare.
Several years ago for my father's birthday I wrote him a short story. It was a fictional piece loosely based on what few things he told me about his war experience. I wasn't surprised when I asked him his opinion of the story that his response was, "There sure was a lot of swearing in there." I understand his deflection - I can't imagine how awful it must be for those people that have suffered from war to revisit it to create art. It makes what Tim O'Brien has done with this novel - and others like him throughout the ages - that much more amazing.
Final note: after finishing this book I called my father to ask him why, when he returned from the war, he didn't go back to his music career (he became an accountant). He said that after that much time away from practicing and focusing on his craft he would never be able to catch-up. He had a young wife and a family to think about. I'll always wonder now how different things would have been for him. He was blessed to escape from Vietnam without suffering casualty, but has the world suffered from not hearing his beautiful piano playing?
Although I will read almost any non-fiction book on war that is recommended to me, it is fiction based upon events that really resonates. If you've read Vonnegut, you can chart his growth as an author through his first few books as he is circling around the main event - until he finally deals with his experience in the fire bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book that changes the reader because Kurt was changed by war. It's not a rational transaction. But neither is life.
Going After Cacciato is a book that has the capacity to re-wire the filters of a reader. The Vietnam War is the setting, but the individual wars suffered and fought daily by the soldiers is the narrative. The action follows a squad of men and their quixotic chase after a fellow soldier gone AWOL with plans to hoof it all the way to Paris from Indochina. As readers we become as changed as the soldiers on their journey. To explain further would be to ruin the magic - consider this great quote on the back cover of my edition, taken from a New York Times review: "To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales."
Virgil C. Dice, Jr. Ready for action.
My father was 26 years old when he was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He had just graduated with a masters in music and had planned on a career as a concert pianist. He and my mother planned on getting married as soon as he finished his graduate program - he petitioned his Congressman to change his enlistment date so they could keep to their plans. Dad never shared much about his experiences, but he did tell me that his deferment saved his life - the base where he was stationed was overrun a month prior to his arrival. In 1997 I made a trip to visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. I saw families and friends of fallen soldiers search for their beloved on the wall, watched them make a keep-sake of that name with a scrap of paper and rubbed charcoal. I took a picture of the book of names to note the fortune of the skip from Robert Floyd Dice to Anthony Dicesare.
Several years ago for my father's birthday I wrote him a short story. It was a fictional piece loosely based on what few things he told me about his war experience. I wasn't surprised when I asked him his opinion of the story that his response was, "There sure was a lot of swearing in there." I understand his deflection - I can't imagine how awful it must be for those people that have suffered from war to revisit it to create art. It makes what Tim O'Brien has done with this novel - and others like him throughout the ages - that much more amazing.
Final note: after finishing this book I called my father to ask him why, when he returned from the war, he didn't go back to his music career (he became an accountant). He said that after that much time away from practicing and focusing on his craft he would never be able to catch-up. He had a young wife and a family to think about. I'll always wonder now how different things would have been for him. He was blessed to escape from Vietnam without suffering casualty, but has the world suffered from not hearing his beautiful piano playing?
ralizakatherine's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
tominaz's review against another edition
4.0
I think some of the other reviewers of Cacciato have forgotten or ignored the enormous challenges that confronted O'Brien in writing a war novel in general and a semi-autobiographical "Vietnam" novel in particular. First there would have been the tremendous difficulty in seamlessly including the autobiographical material to accomplish the necessary verisimilitude. There also would have been the difficulty of coming at the themes of war both obliquely and directly - in a way that honors the tremendous complexity of why war exists and its diffuse meanings viewed through the lens of culture and social expectation yet one that also yawps furiously and unflinchingly at its human costs as well as the immediate and real personal tragedy the Vietnam war inflicted on the author (distilled incredibly in his story "On the Rainy River" from [book: The Things They Carried]). O'Brien overcomes these challenges with admirable and readable finesse as well as with great feeling and compassion.
It is difficult for me to imagine how generic, structural, or stylistic changes to the novel might have resulted in a more artful or polished work without simultaneously forfeiting either the book's acid truths or deeply perceptive thematic nuance. I believe Cacciato to be as readable, moving, and important a soldier's testament to war as either [author: Joseph Heller]'s [book: Catch-22] or [author: Kurt Vonnegut]'s [book: Slaughterhouse Five] and infinitely more satisfying than the perhaps more polished and artful Vietnam novel [book: Dog Soldiers] by [author: Robert Stone].
It is difficult for me to imagine how generic, structural, or stylistic changes to the novel might have resulted in a more artful or polished work without simultaneously forfeiting either the book's acid truths or deeply perceptive thematic nuance. I believe Cacciato to be as readable, moving, and important a soldier's testament to war as either [author: Joseph Heller]'s [book: Catch-22] or [author: Kurt Vonnegut]'s [book: Slaughterhouse Five] and infinitely more satisfying than the perhaps more polished and artful Vietnam novel [book: Dog Soldiers] by [author: Robert Stone].
corneliadolian's review against another edition
2.0
Full disclosure: I might just not be into absurd/ridiculous war literature. I've been unable to make it through Catch-22.
You know how some books are a bit difficult to get into, but once you're solidly in they're really good? This was the opposite. I had little trouble grabbing onto this imaginative war novel, but boy did I have a hard time going back. The problem was that I didn't feel invested in the story-within-the-story that took up more time than the actual narrative. I'm talking about the parts where they actually go after Cacciato, traveling across Vietnam and other places. The parts I found most interesting were the parts in Vietnam, in the war, and the backstory bits on Paul Berlin and others. All of that was amazing. But it comprised maybe 25% of the novel, while the rest was this ridiculous journey toward Paris that I quickly got bored with. Oh, and the characters became caricatures and the single female in the novel was so annoying I kept hoping she'd die.
I get that O'Brien was trying to make statements about the Vietnam War: all the humping the soldiers did, how the mission was more often than not nebulous and maybe it seemed like the laws of the world didn't apply. But I think that could've been done without the extremely elaborate and draggy heading-to-Paris fantasy. Also, the fact that it was a fantasy annoyed me and diminished my interest.
You know how some books are a bit difficult to get into, but once you're solidly in they're really good? This was the opposite. I had little trouble grabbing onto this imaginative war novel, but boy did I have a hard time going back. The problem was that I didn't feel invested in the story-within-the-story that took up more time than the actual narrative. I'm talking about the parts where they actually go after Cacciato, traveling across Vietnam and other places. The parts I found most interesting were the parts in Vietnam, in the war, and the backstory bits on Paul Berlin and others. All of that was amazing. But it comprised maybe 25% of the novel, while the rest was this ridiculous journey toward Paris that I quickly got bored with. Oh, and the characters became caricatures and the single female in the novel was so annoying I kept hoping she'd die.
I get that O'Brien was trying to make statements about the Vietnam War: all the humping the soldiers did, how the mission was more often than not nebulous and maybe it seemed like the laws of the world didn't apply. But I think that could've been done without the extremely elaborate and draggy heading-to-Paris fantasy. Also, the fact that it was a fantasy annoyed me and diminished my interest.
nicflix's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
emmasophierund's review against another edition
5.0
Tim O’Brien is maybe my favorite author (probably tied with Stephen King). He has a magical way of playing with reality and screwing with your head just enough that it makes you feel really smart when you see what he’s doing. I want more!!!! It’s my new mission to read all his books.
paul_cornelius's review against another edition
3.0
I have begun to think that Tim O'Brien has something of a myopic vision when it comes to Vietnam and Southeast Asia. He simply cannot produce anything beyond a vague image of the settings and atmosphere. There is no feel to his Asia, unlike the case with Graham Greene, W. Somerset Maugham, Norman Lewis, or even other Vietnam War writers such as Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, or Philip Caputo. And in no fashion can he equal the work of someone such as Christopher Koch. There is always a curtain that seems to hang between the reader and O'Brien's characters and their situations. In some ways, it's like watching an Antonioni film, where physical barriers constantly intrude and block both the viewer and characters from physical and emotional contact with one another.
All of which is underscored when O'Brien turns from the realism of war to the night of imagination and the journey to Paris (and the peace talks). Both Delhi and Paris come alive in detail. The smell, odors, sounds, sights, and people, who seem so muffled and abstract in Southeast Asia, take on a specificity and vividness not apparent in the outpost or on the missions "in reality." This is where O'Brien is comfortable. The West. Asia is forever beyond him, I think. An alien land whose people are faceless villagers; cities which never make more than a token appearance. The best he can do is summon up a single woman from his fantasy, Sarkin Aun Wang, who isn't Vietnamese, although she comes from Cholon, or Chinese, or Cambodian, or Lao, or Burmese. In some vague way, she seems to be of an unidentified hill tribe, someone herself exiled from the main life of South East Asia. She, too, is a refugee. She doesn't belong. Neither does O'Brien.
All of which is underscored when O'Brien turns from the realism of war to the night of imagination and the journey to Paris (and the peace talks). Both Delhi and Paris come alive in detail. The smell, odors, sounds, sights, and people, who seem so muffled and abstract in Southeast Asia, take on a specificity and vividness not apparent in the outpost or on the missions "in reality." This is where O'Brien is comfortable. The West. Asia is forever beyond him, I think. An alien land whose people are faceless villagers; cities which never make more than a token appearance. The best he can do is summon up a single woman from his fantasy, Sarkin Aun Wang, who isn't Vietnamese, although she comes from Cholon, or Chinese, or Cambodian, or Lao, or Burmese. In some vague way, she seems to be of an unidentified hill tribe, someone herself exiled from the main life of South East Asia. She, too, is a refugee. She doesn't belong. Neither does O'Brien.
shelleebee's review against another edition
5.0
Tim O'Brien is a Minnesotan author just recently added to the IB Prescribed Book List. I was thrilled when I saw his name added and decided to include this, his National Book Award winning novel, to the class. What I like best about this book is O'Brien's blend of fiction and reality in order to access the truth. O'Brien served in the Vietnam War and most of his novels are set there or deal significantly with the war. His best-known work is probably The Things They Carried and is a bit shorter and a bit more accessible as a starting point if you are reading just for fun.