I had been aware of this book for sometime but never really got around to it. Picked it up at HPB a few months ago knowing I should read it at some point and finally did. These are just some of my initial thoughts.
First, a 5/5. It was a really powerful, touching, and well written book. It reminded me a bit of vonnegut in some ways such as the writing style, the black humor, and the use of repetition.
When I started reading it I was at first a little disappointed to find out it was historical fiction but as I made my way through the book I appreciated why he wrote it that way. To paraphrase, “all of it’s true and none of it is”.
I’m very privileged and fortunate enough to have never had to experience this hardship. I’m going to tread lightly and I mean no ill intentions here but this book helped me empathize more with those who’ve had these experiences. I certainly will never truly know, but this book really conveyed the emotions, mundaneness, absurdity, and loss of war, to me at least.
I also felt that this book could be read as a little beyond just war stories. “It’s nobody’s fault. Everybody’s.” I think this applies to even those outside of a war. No one in particular may be responsible for the harms in our world. Collectively we all are. This may be a bit if a stretch but that’s how I interpreted it.
So it goes.
This is my all time favorite book. In AP English in high school, we got to pick the final book we read for class and this is the one I picked at random. I wanted a war story and this is one that came up on the computer search of our library. And oh boy, it is quite the war story. Turns out we had actually read one chapter of the book several years earlier in another English class and it had stuck with me for years, so I was blown away when I got to that chapter again (it’s the one where he was telling his son a war story about his time on ambush where he killed a guy with a grenade. I still distinctly remember the line about how it blew a “star shaped hole” in the guy’s head).
If you liked this book, especially the whole blending of truth and fiction, then please read some of his other books! Going After Cacciato is really trippy but such a good story. I would say it’s even closer to Slaughterhouse 5, just set in Vietnam. "In Lake Of The Woods* is also good, though a bit more grounded and a very different story than the other two books.