I’ve just finished reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried for the first time, and as I told my wife, it’s the kind of book that’s so wonderful, I want to throw it against the wall. I want to throw it against the wall because the beauty and the sorrow in its pages are like butterflies trapped inside a hardened cocoon; if I throw it enough times, the shell will break, and the wings will spread and smear all over the wall for me to remind me every day that death too can be beautiful.
On one level, it’s a collection of short stories about Vietnam. But as the author says, this book is much, much more than that. It’s an extended meditation on storytelling as a kind of resuscitation, breathing back into life those who have been dead. But the dead only live in circumscribed parameters; they can only live as we remember them, or as we imagine them. I was mesmerized by Atonement when it did the same thing, providing the dead with the lives they can now never live without us.
And in that, the tragedy of this book really spreads its wings: O’Brien tells beautiful and tragic stories inspired by true lives, but lives who can never do what lives do, that is, live freely. The dead of his stories rise again, but only to die the same death fifteen pages later, alive only as our memories, alive only in our reflections. None the less, this book is phenomenal. Take and read.
