Amazing, imaginative novel of a squad of grunts marching from S Viet Nam to Paris. I was repeatedly blown away by this journey. Though it predates it by decades, I was very much reminded of Colson Whitehead's _Underground Railroad_, taking a historical fact and catapulting it into fiction by running down the idea with an incredible vision.

Browsed upon at a well-curated bookshop in Port Townsend. ( )

I have begun to think that Tim O'Brien has something of a myopic vision when it comes to Vietnam and Southeast Asia. He simply cannot produce anything beyond a vague image of the settings and atmosphere. There is no feel to his Asia, unlike the case with Graham Greene, W. Somerset Maugham, Norman Lewis, or even other Vietnam War writers such as Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, or Philip Caputo. And in no fashion can he equal the work of someone such as Christopher Koch. There is always a curtain that seems to hang between the reader and O'Brien's characters and their situations. In some ways, it's like watching an Antonioni film, where physical barriers constantly intrude and block both the viewer and characters from physical and emotional contact with one another.

All of which is underscored when O'Brien turns from the realism of war to the night of imagination and the journey to Paris (and the peace talks). Both Delhi and Paris come alive in detail. The smell, odors, sounds, sights, and people, who seem so muffled and abstract in Southeast Asia, take on a specificity and vividness not apparent in the outpost or on the missions "in reality." This is where O'Brien is comfortable. The West. Asia is forever beyond him, I think. An alien land whose people are faceless villagers; cities which never make more than a token appearance. The best he can do is summon up a single woman from his fantasy, Sarkin Aun Wang, who isn't Vietnamese, although she comes from Cholon, or Chinese, or Cambodian, or Lao, or Burmese. In some vague way, she seems to be of an unidentified hill tribe, someone herself exiled from the main life of South East Asia. She, too, is a refugee. She doesn't belong. Neither does O'Brien. ( )

Pretty amazing. Not so amazing as The Things They Carried, but almost. A sentry conjures up a story almost out of the Arabian Nights as the squad pursues a soldier gone AWOL--whose goal is Paris. A lot of reality flies out the door here, but the reality of what goes on in men's hearts and guts during war is as real as it gets. Interspersed with the pursuit, we see flashbacks into the horrible deaths of the squad has suffered. This is an incredible work of imagination, grounded in the reality so thick you would think it would swallow the plot, but it doesn't. About the only way to improve it would be to perhaps cut about 10 or 15 pages. The latter part of the book begins to drag just slightly. ( )

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. ( )

Dreamlike story of a quest and an escape from war, of a soldier in Vietnam who decides he's had enough and begins hiking to Paris, and of the soldiers tasked with bringing him back. The horror and absurdity and sheer unreality of war are on full display in this moving novel. ( )