I was really diappointed in this book.

I read The Things They Carried, and loved it. I think it handled the war and all of the surrounding problems perfectly, and the way that the narrative circled back on itself over and over again was inventive and interesting.

Here, it looks forced. Also, you could probably tell it was an O'Brien book even if his name wasn't on it. Look at the smiliar plot devices: native american soldier the lead character serves with in Vietnam? Check. Main character on a boat with the chance to escape to Canada to freedom? Check. Casual mention of a person blown up into the trees, a la Curt Lemon in TTTC? Check.

Obviously, there's a lot that's different, but there are things that I think could have been handled differently, and better. One of the best parts of the book comes towards the end when we find out that Wade took the time to carefully edit himself out of the My Lai massacre before leaving Vietnam. It shows a deliberate side of Wade that we see very little of. This should have been alluded to better, and was it just the one letter that got Wade caught? Or is there more? That's left out.

I think O'Brien is a one trick pony.

I like Tim O'Brien's writing style and this was a page-turner for the most part. I stumbled quite a bit on the excessive quotes throughout the book and struggled with too much repetition, especially the ghastly repetition of memories from Vietnam. The themes of rape and murder are constantly in your face. Perhaps his point was how often they were in the soldier's face during the war? Maybe, but I believe that enough horror exists in just *imagining* what happened. I wouldn't discount his writing or his genre, but this wasn't my favorite of his.

Τι ανέλπιστο 5άρι,τι γκολ από τα αποδυτήρια!Όταν ανακαλύπτεις βιβλίο σχεδόν εικοσαετίας,που δεν γνωρίζεις καν την ύπαρξή του,και που σε τραβάει από το λαιμό μέσα στην ιστορία του,τότε απλά αράζεις και απολαμβάνεις.
Ένας τύπος εμμονικός,παθιασμένος,βετεράνος του Βιετνάμ,επιτυχημένος πολιτικός που γνώρισε την απόλυτη συντριβή,αποσύρεται με την γυναίκα του σε μια απομονωμένη εξοχική κατοικία,για να ξαναβρούν τα "ίσια" τους,να συμφιλιωθούν με τις καταστάσεις και τελικά να σώσουν το γάμο τους.Ώσπου ένα πρωί,αυτή χάνεται...
Άριστη ψυχογράφηση των πάντων όσων παρουσιάζονται στο βιβλίο,το κακό του πολέμου και η επίδρασή του πάνω στους εμπλεκόμενους εφιαλτικά παρόν σε όλη την ιστορία,και μια σύζυγος που δεν άντεξε άλλο(?),φτάνουν για να δώσω 5⭐.

Superlative, this will get into my all-time top 20 reads. Full video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNn3j...

n  It was a terrible time in their lives and they wanted desperately to be happy. They wanted happiness without knowing what it was, or where to look, which made them want it all the more.n

4.5 stars. After his horrific war crimes come to light, a politician and his wife flee the scandal for a cabin on the shores of Lake of the Woods, seeking a quiet place to lick their wounds. But when his wife vanishes in the middle of the night, the peace they'd hoped for disappears along with her.

In the Lake of the Woods has hovered at the fringes of my radar for years, and I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it, because I found it completely mesmerizing and almost flawless in its execution. It manages to fit into several genres successfully: psychological thriller, love story, war story. Tim O'Brien structures the book perfectly, weaving the past and present effortlessly in a way that really allows the reader to know and understand his characters. His writing is assured and haunting, and there are several scenes that will stick with me for a long time simply because he brought them to life so masterfully.

The most impactful parts of the book for me were the sections about Vietnam, which were both horrifying and thought-provoking. O'Brien delves deeply into the nature of the human psyche -- not just how war itself can affect a person, but also how denial can, and how following orders just for the sake of obedience, and committing atrocities in the name of duty, can have lasting and life-altering consequences.

Chilling and complex, In the Lake of the Woods offers no real answers but is also somehow completely satisfying. It's unlike anything I've ever read and a reading experience I don't think I'll ever forget.

Like his The Things They Carried, this is another meditation on the haunting effect of Vietnam on a generation of Americans and on the national and individual psyche. The narrative is cleverly layered so that it's a while before it becomes clear where the heart of the book lies. On the surface, this is the story of a failed politician and the disappearance of his wife. Only as the layers are peeled back do we see that is also a tale of the needy, wounded psyche of Wade, both fictional individual and a kind of Everyman.

O'Brien writes plain, clean, direct prose but the story he tells is oblique and complicated. Here he uses chapters of hypotheses as well as interviews and multi-time narratives to create a sense of mystery and tension, of possibilities that open up the story rather than closing it down to a defined and resolved ending.

This probably isn't for anyone who wants definitive closure and a completed sense of what happened: but if you enjoy challenging literature that engages the reader and treats her as an intelligent participant in the act of story-telling, then this is potent and satisfying.

I read this for the first time nine years ago in the standard printed book. It was during a time that I was reading a lot of books that were connected with Vietnam. Although Vietnam was my war it was a war that I did not attend. In spite of that, it had a big impact on my life.

So here I am now listening to the audible book and following along with the Kindle book. Maybe I have by now escaped the mystery of how Vietnam actually impacted my life. But this book is about the mystery of another man and how it affected him and ultimately brought him To his knees.

It is a book that alternates between a man’s time in Vietnam and has connections to the infamous My Lai massacre. And the present day location is the Minnesota boundary waters. The events of 20 years ago Continue to haunt our protagonist. Just as they continue to hind the author of the book. The conclusion of the book is strangely formulated without a conclusion and with many of the important paragraphs strangely revealed in footnotes by the author speaking directly to the reader.

————————

It’s all here: Alcoholism; Abortion; Secrets; Magic; Politics; Death; Gambling; Vietnam; Suicide; Infidelity; Mystery; Murder; the Northwest Angle and More.

And suddenly, as though caught in a box of mirrors, John looked up to see his own image reflected on the clinic’s walls and ceiling. Fun-house reflections: deformations and odd angles. He saw a little boy doing magic. He saw a college spy, madly in love. He saw a soldier and husband and seeker of public office. He saw himself from inside out and upside down, the organic chemistry, the twisted chromosomes, and for a second it occurred to him that his own stability was at issue.
. . .
Across the beach Lux and Pat were huddled in conversation. Wade watched them for a few seconds, wondering if he should walk over and demand the handcuffs. Blurt out a few secrets. The teakettle and the boathouse. Tell them he wasn’t sure. Just once in his life: tell everything. Talk about his father. Explain how his whole life had been managed with mirrors and that he now was totally baffled and totally turned around and had no idea how to work his way out. Which was the truth. He didn’t know shit. He didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there or where to go next.
. . .
Maybe that’s what this book is for. To remind me. To give me back my vanished life.
. . .
If all is supposition, if ending is air, then why not happiness? Are we so cynical, so sophisticated as to write off even the chance of happy endings?

For me, any book that is about Vietnam is about a part of my life that is a mystery, an unknown. I avoided going there. Just barely. So all these books about Vietnam give me a glimpse of the horror that I missed. It would be easy to say “the horror that I fortunately missed” but should I write off the chance of a happy ending? Can a war have a happy ending? I don’t think so…

Retrospective Review

First off: this is a wild, weird, dark, confusing and creative novel. You should know going in that you are in no way getting anything that even resembles a traditional narrative. It is non-linear in just about every way a book can be non-linear, but don’t let that turn you off. The way this book is structured really impressed me, and has stuck with me as I believe I read this sometime between December 2019 and February 2020. But I’ll come back to that.

This is a novel about a Vietnam Veteran (we’ll come back to that part as well) who is hiding some dark secrets, but he is also very much in the public eye and is running for office. As dark secrets from his past start to surface, his wife goes missing into the endless lakes and forests of Northern Minnesota, a landscape I love. And really, that’s about it for the plot. This book is a probe, an exploration into the the psyche of trauma and repression. It is also a mystery-kind of-but the real story here is in its themes. A dark past that may never actually leave you. This is a theme that has been explored quite a bit in fiction, and it’s incredibly interesting to me to see all the different perspectives out there.

Now let’s get back to the Vietnam Vet business. This book is written by Tim O’Brien (not the political writer); O’Brien is a Vietnam Vet who has a hell of a story in his own life. I first heard of him from Ken Burns’s brilliant documentary on The Vietnam War, where he is featured heavily. His most famous “novel” is n  The Things They Carried,n and I use quotations as it’s a book that is both fact and fiction, and written as a memoir. I suppose O’Brien himself is the only one who really knows what is fact and fiction in the book, but either way it is a brilliant book and is often called one of the greatest war books every written, and rightfully so. O’Brien has also written a memoir of the war, n  If I Die In A Combat Zone,n which is also very much worth the read. I bring all this up because this book is also very much an exploration of the war, but in a much different way than the previously mentioned books.

This is a purely psychological exploration of the hellish landscape of a man’s mind who may or may not have committed some horrible acts, and is nonetheless living with all kinds of guilt, PTSD, and other psychological distress.

I chose to write this review a year and a half after reading the book because of how damned creative and well-written the thing is. This is a wholly unique novel; I have never read anything like it, and I think it’s worth checking out if you’re into non linear and stream of consciousness style narratives.

Tim O’Brien is an interesting and inherently likable guy. I was inspired to buy a few of his novels after seeing his interviews in Burns’ documentary because I liked him. He comes of as a genuine, kind, and honest person who is dealing with his own repercussions from the war, and there’s no doubt that writing these novels was therapeutic for him. He also is a good storyteller, and that is immediately clear in his interviews. Definitely recommend giving his books and interviews a look.

Once again, Tim O'Brien leaves me with more questions than answers, and once again, I'm in awe of how he does it.

Richard Thinbill's continued trauma about the flies that doesn't make sense at first but then makes more sense as it's repeated and the story is flushed out with other info to explain it, reminds me of Joseph Heller's horrifyingly hilarious conventions in Catch-22.

John Wade's disconnect from the situation of his wife's being missing, his lack of outward expression of love or concern, his calloused, somewhat distant, cold approach to the situation, and his unreliability in terms of the events that happened around her disappearance, all make me wonder if Gillian Flynn happened to read this book before writing Gone Girl.

And then the most obvious parallel I wanted to make throughout reading this book was to The Things They Carried, but oddly I found that harder to do than I'd expected, except for the whole war and ruthless killing aspect. What are we to make of how the story of Wade's horrifying experiences with the Charlie Company at Thuan Yen parallels what the "Evidence" chapters present about the British slaughtering the Americans during the Revolution and the Americans slaughtering the Native Americans? Perhaps O'Brien is making a commentary on the cyclical brutality of wars, where all are guilty of rage and vengeance and inhumanity? TTTC gave me a whole new level of empathy for those brutal killers and their state of mind, so now I wonder, is it fair or excusable for soldiers in those circumstances to say that, "when you look back at things that transpired, things you did, you say: Why? Why did I do that? That is not me. Something happened to me" (262).

Another similarity I appreciate with TTTC is that it doesn't matter -- and we can't know -- if he actually did it, but he's guilty anyway and he grieved either way.

And of course, there's our (unreliable?) footnote/authorial narrator, who sticks himself in and seems so truthful but confesses to having secrets and knowing about deception, not unlike the narrator Tim in TTTC.

I still need to process all the recurring ideas running through the book and what they mean to me beyond the text, but I'm not sure I'll ever have answers so here they are:
- Magic/disappearing/tricks/the mirror box/his Sorcerer title: Did John Wade use all this to hide from what happened to him, hide who he was? Or because he didn't know who he was? Or as the only way he knew of sharing who he was? Or a way of owning himself and her? Or maybe I should be wondering why O'Brien uses these devices more than why Wade does? (And don't we all present and start to then believe these alternate versions of ourselves, these tricks and illusions, though likely not quite so literally?)
- The craving, the desire, the overwhelming need for love and adoration and acceptance as a result of some low self esteem or feelings of inadequacy, especially for public figures like politicians and war heroes (and personally speaking, pseudo-semi-public figures like teachers to a lesser degree?)
- Why do the mostly-unwilling spouses support these public figures through all the politicking and the scandals despite how these partners must be destroyed by it? Or maybe occasionally they somehow manage to recover from it with renewed drive. (HRC?)
- The frustrating impossibility of stopping the loop of death as a repeated act (because we keep replaying it?) and how people "were never quite dead, otherwise they would surely stop dying" (283).
- Does one plus one equal zero, like those weirdo snakes swallowing one another's tails? Is that happiness? Is it possible? What if "those two dumbass snakes had somehow managed to gobble each other up?" (300). But of course we know "Love wasn't enough. Which was the truth. The saddest thing of all" (174).

And perhaps most importantly, with everything else in this book, what is O'Brien saying about memory and truth and how our mind betrays us time and again and what it tricks us into believing or forgetting? Is that betrayal/repression a result of our guilt, or the only way to survive, or both?

I so very much want answers to all my questions, but at some point I just need to "Give it up. Totally hopeless. Nobody will ever know" (266).

I'm so hopeful of having so much answered for me when I see Tim O'Brien speak at Dominican University on Tuesday (7/19/16), but I'm pretty sure I will still be left with mystery and uncertainty and eternal doubt. And would I want it any other way?

"If all is supposition, if ending is air, then why not happiness?" (299).

"But truth won't allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved....All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark, there is only the maybe" (301).

Whoever undertakes to write a biography binds himself to lying, to concealment, to flummery ... Truth is not accessible.

Sigmund Freud, as cited by Alfred Kazin, "The Self as History: Reflections on Autobiography".


5 stars for sure. Gripping, amazing read. Not a fun read though. Parts are too intense to be fun.


O'Brien the consummate unreliable (third person) narrator here. And he's at his most unreliable when it looks like he's being most reliable. Footnotes here, there, everywhere. Many of the footnotes reference books which are most certainly real. Many references to books about atrocities, one atrocity in particular: The Court Martial of William Calley for example. Four Hours in My Lai for example. Report of the Department of the Army, Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident for example. Many also reference personal interviews which the narrator conducted. Really?

Writing of My Lai …

Sorcerer uttered meaningless sounds – "No", he said, then after a second he said, "Please!" – and then the sunlight sucked him down a trail toward the center of the village, where he found burning hootches and brightly mobile figures engaged in murder. Simpson was killing children. PFC Weatherby was killing whatever he could kill. A row of corpses lay in the pink-to-purple sunshine along the trail – teenagers and old women and two babies and a young boy. Most were dead, some where almost dead. The dead lay very still. The almost-dead did twitching things until PFC Weatherby had occasion to reload and make them fully dead. The noise was fierce. No one was dying quietly. There were squeakings and chickenhouse sounds … Meadlo and the lieutenant were spraying gunfire into a crowd of villagers. They stood side by side, taking turns. Meadlo was crying … The air was hot and wet … He ran past a smoking bamboo schoolhouse. Behind him and in front of him, a brisk machine-gun wind pressed through Thuan Yen. The wind stirred up a powdery red dust that sparkled in the morning sunshine, and the little village had now gone mostly violet … Hutto was shooting corpses. T'Souvas was shooting children. Doherty and Terry were finishing off the wounded. This was not madness, Sorcerer understood. This was sin. He felt it winding through his own arteries, something vile and slippery like heavy black oil in a crankcase … A period of dark time went by, maybe an hour, maybe more … There were flies now – a low droning buzz that swelled up from somewhere deep inside the village.

… and on it went.

Some of the notes are extended first-person ruminations, almost confessional in nature, about the author's experiences in Vietnam, his memories many years later, of those experiences, his fading memories, things he thinks he remembers, but isn't sure that he does.

The protagonists? Well, the novel is a romance, a love story. As near as the narrator can figure out. John and Kathy Wade. Madly in love, but somehow acting a little bit funny, are they really in love? The narrator speculates, delves into their thoughts, their own memories. Here he is, paradoxically, perhaps being the most reliable? Remember this author's insistence in The Things They Carried that the most true war stories are ones which never happened? Kind of the same thing here. Did the things remembered, or maybe remembered, happen? Does is matter? What are we being told about the human psyche, human memory, human love, human emotion, human fright, the attempt to forget, to hide from oneself things which may have been done, which seem to be remembered but which maybe never happened, at least in the way remembered.

One very reliable topic narrated here, as it winds its way increasingly into the story, is that of the Lake of the Woods.

Max. lengtht68 mi (109 km)
Max. widtht59 mi (95 km)
Surface areat1,679 sq mi (4,348.6 km2)
Max. deptht210 ft (64 m)
Shore length excluding islands: 25,000 mi (40,000 km)
including islands: 65,000 mi (105,000 km)
number of islands: >14,500

Lying in the north country of Minnesota, and partially in two Canadian provinces, the Lake of the Woods is described in O'Brien's inimitable prose, as here: someone is steering a boat through this wilderness, beginning to realize that they have missed a known channel and are now somewhere in the lake that they have never been – and the wilderness, the trees, the dense forests on the islands, the water, the sun, the clouds – nothing shows any sign of being different, any likelihood of being a landmark, there are no signs, no cabins, no other boats, nothing …

(paraphrase) He brought the boat around and followed the shoreline in a generally westward direction, looking for a channel south. The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. He was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest … for a long time he followed the curving shoreline, moving at low throttle, watching the sun sink toward the trees straight ahead. The wind was colder. He passed between a pair of tiny islands, veered north to skirt a spit of rocks and sand, then aimed the boat into a wide stretch of choppy water. After more than an hour nothing much had changed. The purest wilderness, everything tangled up with everything else … A little island seemed to float before him in the purply twilight, partly masked by a stand of reeds and cattails …

Not an easy read. Yet couldn't put it down. Burned my fingers I think.



. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Previous library review: The Things They Carried
Next library review: A Firing Offense G Pelecanos

Mein Leben ist zur kurz für weitere 220 Seiten mit zwei unsympathischen und nie so recht nachvollziehbaren Charakteren, von denen die Frau spurlos verschwindet, während ihr Massaker-Mann seine Wahlniederlage verdauen will. Und da ohnehin nicht aufgeklärt wird, ob ihr permanent stalkender Mann sie auf dem Gewissen hat, oder ob sie bei einer Flucht mit dem Boot und einem 1,5-PS-Motor im See ersoffen ist, breche ich ab,

I almost passed on this book. After having read three of O'Brien's Vietnam War works, I had begun to feel that there was too much lacking in them. This was especially true of The Things They Carried and Going After Caccioto, where his obsession with experiments in form ended up being clumsy and heavy-handed. Then, I found that If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home was insightful and challenging in its own way. But in all three books, O'Brien nevertheless seemed not to understand Southeast Asia. Worse, he didn't even seem to understand that he didn't understand Southeast Asia. Something of an irritation with works centered on the Vietnam War.

But with In the Lake of the Woods this "fault" seems to work in his favor. All the atmosphere, setting, and feel absent from his descriptions of Southeast Asia only highlight the vividness of his world back home, back in Minnesota, especially in the wilderness of its lakes and islands on the cusp of autumn. This is the world that Vietnam shattered, not only for John Wade but for a generation of soldiers, particularly those who were in combat during Vietnam. It's a telling that demonstrates how memory has been severed from itself. All the iterations of John and Kath's story depict that--the constant reveals and re-reveals. And, here, O'Brien's obsessions with shifting perspectives, disrupted timelines, flashbacks and flash forwards all work to perfection. It all comes together in this novel.

For Wade, Vietnam is a dream, a nightmare, an hallucination. And maybe that is, or was, true for the entire country. By 1994, when In the Lake of the Woods was published, the great Vietnam War cycle of films, literature, and television programs was over. A new set of wars in the Middle East were just pushing themselves into the forefront of the American consciousness. And the digital age online was just beginning. In that regard, In the Lake of the Woods has turned out to be visionary. The shock and fragmentation of the war in Southeast Asia on soldiers was about to applied in a milder, albeit more unrelenting and pervasive, assault upon all the golden dreams of youth and a stable America of the pre-1960s that O'Brien seems to yearn for so often. Yet if In the Lake of the Woods tells us anything it is that all memories, all iterations, are just as real as they are a fantasy. Is there a difference? Isn't fantasy, in fact, real? Don't we really fantasize? If memory is all there is to help determine a difference, how can you ever tell?