The things they carried

A collection of linked and overlapping stories about the experience of being in country during Vietnam charged with the flavor of that wartime experience so different from our other wars. The anecdotes loop around on themselves to charge the images with a second or third dose of significance after the passage of time has changed their significance in the narrator's mind, becoming more shattering, more sickening, more nightmarish, or more baffling depending on the angle they come around. Not everything is to be taken at face value, for it does not profess to be a memoir.
I had to admire it for what it was without completely accepting what it held out to me as art. It was like visiting a collection of gruesome curios over and over again, not always an easy read with a clean takeaway. I will never have a remotely comparable experience of my own to know what it is like to set them down in words, so I can only guess what it was like for the author to make the choices he did in structuring the book the way he did. Maybe a better way to read the work is to charge right through it at once, over a long weekend maybe, instead of stretching it out over months the way I did.