The Things They Carried

Description:

This copy of "The Things They Carried" has been SIGNED by Tim O'Brien on the title page. While there may have been a "1st State" Dustjacket with a slight offset -- this copy has a proper dustjacket -- which would show better on your bookcase! On the surface "The Things They Carried" is a sequence of award-winning stories about a platoon of young foot soldiers caught up in the madness of the Vietnam War. At the same time, it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme. Each chapter flows into the next. The stories echo each other. And on a third level, this amazing book is bound together by Tim O'Brien's own voice and character - a twenty-three-year-old foot soldier, a forty-three-year-old writer re-creating that experience. Winner of France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger Prize. Seller Inventory # 9149

About this title:

• 4.14
  313,119 ratings by Goodreads

Synopsis: Heroic young men carry the emotional weight of their lives to war in Vietnam in a patchwork account of a modern journey into the heart of darkness

Review: "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Things They Carried
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, Boston/New York
Publication Date: 1990
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: First Edition/First Printing