NOPE NOPE NOPE this book was not for me. i had zero interest about the topic, and i if it weren’t for ap lit in would’ve never read this. parts of the narrative were just… boring imo. also was not a fan of the ending, like at all. just did not connect with the plot or the characters.

OKAY REVIEW UPDATE: so reflecting a bit on the book, the main issue was that it just wasn’t for me, y’know? like i’m a 17 year old girl in the suburbs and this book centers around the horrors of the vietnam war so there’s that inherit disconnect (honestly feeling a bit like that one hippie chick in the chevy impala that gets robbed in the book LMAO) . there were definitely a few parts that i thought were interesting, but in my opinion there was so much filler in between that i could not get into the plot. maybe that part isn’t filler and my pea-sized brain just doesn’t grasp its complexity.maybe this is a book that will grow on me as i mature more… maybe not. what i do know is that this book wasn’t a standout to me in any way.

2.5 ⭐️

These were hard lessons, true, but they were lessons of ignorance: ignorant men, trite truths. What remained was a simple event. The facts, the physical things. A war like any war. No new messages. Stories that began and ended without transition. No developing drama or tension or direction. No order.
-- Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato



At the level of the grunt, the soldier, the dirt and the blood, who wouldn't want to run? Who wouldn't fantasize about just dropping everything and leaving the madness of war, the insanity of the Army, the brutality of killing and instead take an 8500+ mile trip to Gay Paree?

It seems a rational choice: to choose freedom, happiness, liberty. To say cut it, cork it and just run. Leave the swamps of uncertainty, death, and fear behind you. Become a refugee from the carnage of Vietnam. Seek to relocate your tired ass to a place where dumb muthers aren't trying to shoot you. Find some piece of Earth where you aren't sleeping in holes, crawling into tunnels, worrying about whether the bullet that gets you will be audible. Get the hell out of Dodge.



If that was the extent of this novel's vision, it would be a pretty damn good book, but O'Brien tweaks it. He doesn't go for the easy answers. For every tick he gives you a tock. He finds ambiguity everywhere, conflict over each hill. It isn't a simple moral point to stay or go, to fight or to run. War has its own reality. It will exhaust you and then follow up. This confrontation with fear, death, loyalty, morality, friendship, leading, following, is key. The key to this novel is conflict. The conflict is key.

With lyrical beauty, flashbacks, and a magical realism that I've never experienced in a novel about the Vietnam War, O'Brien spins a story that is just that: a yarn, a spin, a giant fantasy race, a road movie, a Moby-Dick, a Danse Macabre, a metaphysical and very modern dance. It is a story of the good, the bad; those who run and those who follow. It is a literary shadow sculpture built out of the debris of war, the stories and cast-offs (the living and the dead).
___________________

- Robert Farwell / Edward Jones library / Mesa, AZ 2014

Good and confusing in a good way. Writers blow my mind sometimes. How did Tim O’Brien even figure out how to write this book. It’s a non linear narrative, plus it has a little bit of magical realism (which just matched the dizziness and confusion and mania of the Vietnam war so well, it really blows my mind). I say, don’t read this just because you liked The Things They Carried because it really is very different. But O’Brien’s style (and in some places, you could tell he was drawing from the same Nam memory as he did in TTTC, I’m looking at you, baby water buffalo scene), so it’s like, if you liked TTTC and also separately are interested in the Vietnam war and this novel as it’s own entity and not as a sequel, you’ll like this. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, kiddos.
Anyways I really liked it and Tim O’Brien is such a good writer imo that it’s ok that he pretty much just writes about Vietnam.

Cacciato is a soldier who abandoned the war with the plan to escape Vietnam for Paris. What follows is the hunt for Cacciato, first through Vietnam, then Laos, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, and finally Paris. But, in fact (and this is not a spoiler), this is all just the imaginings of the main protagonist Paul Berlin, a newcomer to Vietnam, as a way to escape the reality of the war.

What I found most poignant, also as in his The Things They Carried, is how O'Brien vividly shows both the horrors of the war and the reality of daily life in Vietnam:

Out of all that time, time aching itself away, his memory sputtered around those scant hours of horror. The real war was forgotten. The dullness and the heat and the endless tracts of time and the tired villages and petty conversations and warmed-over jokes and rivalries and rumors and hole-digging and hole-filling and the long marches without incident or foul play--all this was blurred and fuzzy like a far-off summer day. (286)

The novel also highlights the ambiguities of the war, the soldiers not always knowing exactly who they were fighting or what they were fighting for:

They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory...They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, the did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence larger outcomes... (270)

Moreover, he ingeniously identifies the main issue the US faced in Vietnam. On the way through Laos, the soldiers find themselves trapped in a tunnel occupied by a single North Vietnamese soldier, who then tells them they are his prisoners of war.

"POWs? Is that basically it? You're saying we're POWs?"
"I fear so."
"Of course," Corson said gently, "we do have you outmanned."
"Of course," nodded Li Van Hgoc.
"Outmanned, not to mention outgunned."
"Again, sir, that is a clear piece in the overall puzzle."
"Outmanned, outgunned, and outtechnologized." Lieutenant Corson tapped his finger against the weapon's plastic stock.
"Well spoken," the enemy said. "A neat summary of the issues. Very well spoken." (92-3)

Even with all the manpower, weaponry, and technology at the US disposal, this war was not winnable.

My first opinion of this book is that I found it disappointing. This 336 page book is the first by the extremely talented, Vietnam veteran, Tim O'Brien set during the Vietnam War.
Since O'Brien had experienced all the horrors of being an infantry soldier I was expecting a gritty account of a soldier's life.

How in the world this brilliant young man becomes an Infantry soldier is puzzling since only the lowest I.Q.'s were steered into this deadly occupation. A soldier with the lowest I.Q. could still have a lot of common sense which would make them excellent soldiers, if properly lead, but poor O'Brien must've been a fish out of water to begin with.

The story is told by Private Paul Berlin, a new arrival to his infantry company as he muses over his past experiences in Vietnam while relating his present circumstances.

Berlin's present storyline is confusing to say the least as a few members of his company are tasked with finding the AWOL soldier, Cacciato, who is heading overland for Paris to escape the horrors of war.
The whole company had been traumatized as their buddies have one by one met horrible deaths in battle and Cacciato has apparently gone over the deep end.

As Berlin relates the current task of finding Cacciato he muses over each and every death in gory, horrific detail.

Things become very confusing as they continue their quest into Laos without reporting to their commander where they are going. They liberally begin to spend money all along the journey chasing Cacciato to Paris. Where is this money coming from?

This and other peculiarities made me start wondering:Are they really dead and don't know it?
Have the horrors of war made Berlin lose his mind and is he relating his tale while undergoing psychiatric therapy?

As I plowed eagerly through this book to find out what was going on, O'Brien ends his story with Paul Berlin awakening from a dream. Anybody remember the TV series "Dallas" and Bobby's dream season? I felt a little cheated with this ending to be honest and couldn't help but think is that all there is? Most of this novel is set during the present with Berlin's dream sequence, which was WAY too long, leaving me wishing the author had included his audience a lot sooner than the last few pages as to the reality of Berlin's situation.

The good news is that O'Brien has enormous talent and I would definitely read more of his books.

Anyone curious about the Vietnam War will find this book interesting and educational as O'Brien makes that era come to life with realistic characters that are unique and memorable.

Annals of Coincidence, entry #1: I met Kareem a few days after New Year's in New York, at a restaurant we both like. It was a Tuesday; I think it was around 1pm. It was one of those wonderful, finite number of weekdays when I didn't have to work. As we ate and drank beer, Kareem told me about the book he'd been reading and enjoying, The World According to Garp, by John Irving, which I've never read. Heard the title a few times over the years, heard the name John Irving, didn't know one had written the other. After eating, I suggested we go looking for a bookstore that I remembered being located around that general area. It was so cold out that after five minutes you wanted to go inside- somewhere, anywhere. But we found the bookstore; it's a long, narrow place below street level with wooden shelves and a trailer in the back. This old edition of Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien has the kind of cover you just don't see anymore. There's a stake planted in the ground with two arrows pointed in opposite directions: “Saigon”, and “Paris, 8,600 miles.” There’s also a line of soldiers, a large plant suggestive of jungle, a full moon, and a man’s face; it looks as if he’s dreaming or remembering these things. The only thing I've ever read by Tim O'Brien is The Things They Carried, which I remember thinking was just okay, except for the one unforgettable anecdote about a guy who somehow gets his American girlfriend to come over to Vietnam. She (the girlfriend) starts to spend time with members of the special forces, and after a few weeks goes out on patrol with them. Finally, she disappears; the boyfriend finds her in one of the special forces’ cabins, naked except for a necklace of human tongues. Tongues or maybe ears. I assumed this book was also nonfiction about Vietnam.

Another thing about the store is that they don’t accept cards. Kareem offered to spot me $4, and I bought him coffee afterwards. What's that you say, a cup of coffee almost never costs $4? True enough; I'll have to buy him another coffee, or a $2 book, or two $1 books, next time I see him, which was supposed to be last week, but wasn't. Once we were seated, I opened the book and read the first few lines aloud: "It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker..."

"Sounds like a novel", Kareem said.

"Hmm."

Is it a novel about a guy (Cacciato, I assume) who tries to walk from Vietnam to Paris? The possibility reminds me of two people: Richard Swanson, who a few years ago tried to walk from Seattle to Sao Paulo, for the World Cup, and was hit by a car and killed in Oregon; and Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan and was held by the Taliban for five years. My sympathy is instinctively with someone like Bergdahl (not knowing the full story), and so my fear about this book is that it won't challenge that sympathy; and that Cacciato will be some romantic, childlike, Forrest Gump kind of character who is too pure for the war. We'll see.

Oh, here's the coincidental part. A few days after purchasing the book (or after Kareem purchased it for me, rather), I noticed this little yellow banner along the top: "Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction." Sounds prestigious. And possibly something else that should have indicated to me that it's a novel. Just for fun, I went online and looked up the list of National Book Award winners, for fiction. Going After Cacciato won the award in 1979, beating out four other nominees, including...The World According to Garp, by John Irving.

Da che ho memoria l'elemento del realismo magico non mi è mai piaciuto. Pecco sicuramente di troppo pragmatismo e quando mi capita il libro sbagliato sotto mano finisco con l'annoiarmi molto in fretta. Il che, in questo caso particolare, è un gran peccato perchè Tim O'Brien è un autore di cui, dopo aver letto il magnifico The Things They Carried, leggerei quasi tutto. Questo breve libro, però, è certamente tenuto in gran considerazione da molti lettori, ma proprio non fa per me.

Only after closing this highly satisfying read -- one of many I've downed by this author -- did I realize it was written in 1979, long before many of his others. A trip from the hopeful to the tragic, from the fantastic to the grotesque, O'Brien had me both dreaming and nightmaring every night with his hypnotic imagery and his journey from the exterior world to the inner realms of soldiers' minds and memories (note to the wise, not a bedtime read). Gorgeous panaromic on the realities of war and the escapism it inspires, the story of a group of soldiers chasing their errant comrade, who has decided to eschew the war for the pleasures of a journey to Paris from Vietnam, tells us so much of what was, what could have been, and what we'll never know. Highly recommended!

It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.

I read this on a whim during a transition period. I appreciated its swagger. The premise is simple and fantastic, an infantryman frustrated by the lack of progress at the Paris Peace Talks, decides to walk there from Vietnam and his peers pursue him to save him from his own idealism.

Sospeso tra guerra, realtà e sogno, insieme a Matterhorn uno dei più bei romanzi di guerra che io abbia mai letto. Forse il migliore. Una cosa è certa, Tim O'Brien scrive da dio e nonostante non sia facile seguire i salti tra i piani narrativi è comunque uno sforzo che vale la pena fare. Entrare nella testa di Paul Berlin, scappare con lui per tornare alla realtà con uno schiaffo è il motivo per cui esistono i romanzi. Stupendo.

3,75

going straight to 2 stars if i bomb this timed write