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Mar 30, 2017sgcf rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Generally I don’t like war stories but The Things They Carried is going on my Favorites list. But it’s not simply a war story. It’s a tangled enigma. In O’Brien’s own words it’s a love story. But it’s also a memoir. It’s a fiction, and a guide on how to write a story. It’s a contemplation on life, and ways to handle violent death. It’s a rumination on the concepts of memory, and truth, and how those two diverge in the stories we tell. It is regret, and remorse, and a celebration. It’s lyrical in its imagery. And it’s a fierce telling of the brutal experience that was Viet Nam. This book is brilliant and O’Brien’s powerful writing style makes it so. "Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos … you lose your sense of the definite, your sense of truth itself, therefore in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”