| Title | : | Going After Cacciato |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0767904427 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780767904421 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 351 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1978 |
| Awards | : | National Book Award Fiction (1979) |
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Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, Going After Cacciato captures the peculiar mixture of horror and hallucination that marked this strangest of wars.
In a blend of reality and fantasy, this novel tells the story of a young soldier who one day lays down his rifle and sets off on a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. In its memorable evocation of men both fleeing from and meeting the demands of battle, Going After Cacciato stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle in the hearts of us all.
Going After Cacciato Reviews
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"You VC?" he demanded of a little girl with braids. "You dirty VC?" The girl smiled. "Shit, man," she said gently. "You shittin' me?"
I met Tim O'Brien briefly when he toured for
In the Lake of the Woods back in 1994. Along with his signature he wrote on my copy of the book the word "Peace". I thanked him for his service to his country and I can remembered he paused for a moment, just long enough for me to think I'd completely FUBARed the situation. Then he stood up and shook my hand looking me in the eye for a little longer than was comfortable. There was this bristling energy coming off him and I found myself tongue tied. I'd planned to talk to him about his importance to Vietnam War literature. I stood there wrestling with my mind trying to force it to reengage to pop out of vapor lock. He handed the book back to me and I had to move on. I do wish that I hadn't stood there like a moron, but I wouldn't have traded that handshake for anything.
Soldier Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien was drafted into the United States Army in 1968 and served in Vietnam until 1970.
Cacciato has a dream. He will share this dream with anyone who will give him the time to tell it. He is convinced that he can leave the war in Vietnam and walk to Paris. One day he disappears and the platoon knows he has started to realize his dream. Paul Berlin is a dreamer. On every report card ever sent home to his parents teachers made a notation about his excessive daydreaming. In Vietnam he is focused much more closely on minute detail than he is on the scope of the war. For example after pickup basketball games he goes through every pass, every shot, every spin move; picking it apart, finding the errors, and fixing what went wrong. The war is like a fly buzzing in the window just within his peripheral vision, but the real world was existing behind his eyes.
In his fantasy world the platoon takes off through the jungle after Cacciato.
"Yes, they were in jungle now. Thick dripping jungle. Club moss fuzzing on bent branches, hard green bananas dangling from trees that canopied in lush sweeps of green, vaulted forest light in yellow-green and blue-green and olive-green and silver-green, the smell of chlorophyll, jungle sounds and jungle depth. It was true jungle. Soft, humming jungle. Everywhere, greenery deep in greenery, earth like sponge. Itching jungle, lost jungle. A botanist's madhouse."
Reality mixes in with fantasy as the platoon continues its quest to find Cacciato. All the members of the platoon are frustrated to various degrees with the war. "So here we are...nothing to order, no substance. Aimless, that's what it is: a bunch of kids trying to pin a tail on the Asian donkey. But no fuckin tail. No fuckin donkey."
In his mind Paul moves the platoon about like chess pieces on a board. Improbable circumstances develop needing improbable solutions for the fantasy quest to continue. I identified with Paul maybe too much. I have always spent an inordinate amount of time daydreaming and given the unbelievable circumstances that a front line soldier in Vietnam often found himself; I would be building cities, developing characters, and living as much as possible in a world of my own creating. Paris, to Cacciato and; therefore, for Paul, is looked on as the first city among civilization, and when they dream about leaving the war they are dreaming about escaping to the most civilized place on the planet.
This was a quick read. The whole time I'm marveling at the ability of Tim O'Brien to keep all the balls suspended in the air. He made me believe what was fantasy and disbelieve what was real. He discusses fear and courage and duty and the blurred lines that define all of them. An unusual Vietnam book, but a book that tries to shine a light on a war that made no sense whatsoever. A war "without clear moral purpose."
"The issue, of course, was courage. How to behave. Whether to flee or fight or seek an accommodation. The issue was not fearlessness. The issue was how to act wisely in spite of fear. Spiting the deep-running biles: that was true courage. He believe this. And he believed the obvious corollary: the greater a man's fear, the greater his potential courage."
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ADDIO ALLE ARMI - A FAREWELL TO ARMS
Era una guerra così fantastica che dovrebbero farne un film.
Una guerra splendida e umida, disse Stink Harris.
La guerra è uno degli incubi peggiori.
Ma se da un incubo ci si può liberare facendo un sogno - per esempio, sognando che dal Vietnam si può camminare verso ovest, a piedi attraverso il Laos, la Birmania, l’India, l’Afghanistan, l’Iran, la Turchia, e una volta ad Atene, il più è fatto: prossima tappa, e meta finale, Parigi. La città delle luci è la classica botta di vita, specie dopo l’incubo della guerra del Nam – allora, questo libro è un sogno.
Soldati statunitensi della 25ª divisione fanteria nella missione Search & Destroy dell'estate 1966.
Cacciato, più ottuso di una pallottola, uno che va a pesca nei crateri delle bombe, l’ha minacciato più volte.
E un giorno lo fa: non ne può più della guerra, del suo delirio, della sua noia e follia, della violenza e del sangue, delle esplosioni e degli spari. Un bel giorno Cacciato se ne va, s’avvia da solo a piedi dal Vietnam a Parigi: è la stagione dei monsoni e precorrendo Forrest Gump di un pacco d’anni e passi, s’incammina per ottomilaseicento miglia, tredicimilaottocento chilometri.
E così diventa disertore.
Soldati della 1ª divisione cavalleria aerea in azione durante la battaglia di Ia Drang.
La sua squadra, la terza squadra (primo plotone, compagnia Alpha, quinto battaglione del quarantaseiesimo fanteria) è costretta a inseguirlo, perché Cacciato adesso va fermato, arrestato, riportato alla base: non è una scampagnata, è una missione, è sempre guerra.
Però, presto diventa una scampagnata. E i soldati della squadra diventano altrettanti disertori.
Soldati statunitensi della 1st Cavalry Division in combattimento accanto ai loro elicotteri UH-1.
E siccome la guerra in Vietnam (che coinvolse anche la Cambogia e il Laos) fu guerra psichedelica e lisergica per eccellenza, capita che per terra si spalanchino buchi che inghiottono la squadra, il carro e il bufalo, la giovane deliziosa profuga e le due zie più anziane che piangono in continuazione la morte dell’altro bufalo. Buchi che si aprono in gallerie nelle quali sembra che si resterà intrappolati e prigionieri. Ma l’entrata è anche l’uscita, e per tornare a casa bisogna diventare profughi, da questi buchi si può anche cadere fuori e ritrovarsi in Birmania, o meglio, in Mandalay.
Cioè, Oltre Lo Specchio.
Marine statunitensi impegnati nel rastrellamento di un villaggio durante l'operazione Georgia nel 1966.
E siccome Cacciato è un po’ miraggio e un po’ Godot, capita di ritrovarlo circondato da monaci buddisti, anche lui in tonaca, però più simile a frate Tuck che a un vero religioso birmano.
Poi lo si vede sulla copertina di una rivista di Nuova Delhi: alle sue spalle il treno per Kabul.
A Teheran la squadra festeggia il natale tagliando un bell’abete nei National Memorial Gardens dello scià, albero che addobbano con medaglie, cordicelle, bombe a mano e candele. Conclusi i festeggiamenti natalizi, vedono un’esecuzione pubblica e presto rischiano la decapitazione proprio come il giovane soldato decollato in piazza, un altro disertore.
Forze USA bombardano col napalm posizioni Viet Cong nel 1965.
Tra fantasia e realtà, una fuga dalla guerra che è un viaggio della mente: la guerra è un’esperienza surreale cui si può sopravvivere solo abdicando alla razionalità.
Dice O’Brien:
È difficile separare ciò che è accaduto da ciò che è sembrato accadere. Ciò che sembra accadere diviene a sua volta accaduto, e così deve essere raccontato.
My Lai
Ma il protagonista non è Cacciato, quello del titolo, quello inseguito: il vero protagonista è Paul Berlin. Il romanzo è tutto dal punto di vista del soldato scelto Paul Berlin.
E per Paul Berlin, il sognatore, è tutto reale.
Ma, forse, anche no.
A prescindere dal mio smisurato interesse per la guerra del Nam, il romanzo di Tim O’Brien è un gran bel libro, probabilmente il miglior romanzo mai scritto sull’argomento.
Se non altro, il migliore che io abbia mai letto.
Le sue intenzioni erano benevole. Non era un tiranno, non era uno sbirro, non era uno yankee assassino. Era innocente. Questo avrebbe voluto dire agli abitanti dei villaggi, se avesse conosciuto la lingua, se ci fosse stato il tempo per parlare. Gli avrebbe detto che lui non voleva fare del male a nessuno. Nemmeno al nemico. Lui non aveva nemici. Non aveva fatto torto a nessuno. Se avesse conosciuto la lingua, gli avrebbe detto quanto detestava veder bruciare i villaggi. Detestava veder sconvolgere le risaie. Come diventava furioso e triste quando… un milione di cose, quando le donne venivano toccate sfacciatamente, quando ai vecchi venivano fatte calare le brache per perquisirli, quando, in un villaggio chiamato Thin Mau, Oscar e Rudy Chassler avevano ammazzato dieci cani per il gusto di farlo… Ma io no, avrebbe voluto dirgli. Gli altri, forse, ma io no. Colpevole forse di essere stato incerto, di essermi lasciato trascinare, di essere stato vittima della gravità e degli obblighi e deglie venti, ma – no! – non colpevole di intenti malvagi.
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Paul Berlin never wanted to be a soldier.
He'd never really had any professional aspiration, other than to play baseball, but when he's drafted into the Vietnam war, a soldier he becomes.
Turns out, he isn't a natural. When he enters combat, he suffers panic attacks that cause him to experience a debilitating shame in front of his peers and his commander.
In his desire to disassociate from his circumstances, Paul decides to pursue a fellow soldier who's gone AWOL, a young man named Cacciato who, in his childlike enthusiasm, has abandoned the undesirable war for a journey, on foot, to Paris.
The trick was to concentrate on better things. The trek to Paris. All the things seen and felt, all the happy things.
So Paul heads to Paris in pursuit of Cacciato with his ragtag band of survivors from his squad and his lieutenant, who is suffering from dysentery.
Or does he?
Paris is not a place. It is a state of mind.
And, unfortunately, “none of the roads led to Paris.”
What follows is part dreamscape, part reality, and you get a strong sense, as a reader, of how Tim O'Brien himself might have managed to survive his time serving in this complicated war.
This is a memorable novel, full of a ridiculous amount of meaningful observations about war and freedom, and I absolutely recommend it. . .
But, if you're going to read only one Tim O'Brien book in your lifetime, I still recommend
The Things They Carried.
Cacciato is O'Brien's National Book Award winner, but Carried is O'Brien's magnum opus. -
Let me tell you something about Tim O’Brien.
Tim O’Brien can write.
I don’t mean Tim O’Brien can express ideas well, or that Tim O’Brien knows how to make cogent points using the written language. Hell, I can do that. I can wake up hungover, drink a liter of coffee, and crank out an essay with a title like “Intertextuality in Victorian Memoir: the Solipsism of Affect,” or some such mumbo-jumbo, and it’ll make your average literature professor at The Community College of Seriously Misfortuned Academics swoon.
I can also write instructions, technical memoranda, exposition of physical or mathematical theory, love letters, anecdotes, recipes, computer code in any number of out-of-date languages, journal entries, and sometimes – sometimes I can even write a book review.
But I can’t write like Tim O’Brien. No way. Tim O’Brien’s got that something you know when you see it. That raw talent to transform the semiotic into the spiritual. That thunderous, sensuous grasp of prose that catches you unawares at a bus station, on your couch, in an airplane, and suddenly your hands are gripped tight at the edges of the worn paperback, knuckles white, and your eyes are speeding down the page and you’re careening through a world so vivid that you would never be able to say that this was not reality itself and believe it.
Yes, Tim O’Brien can do that. On the other hand, Tim O’Brien lacks focus.
Ah! But surely, you say, if any novel can be excused of lacking focus, this is it, no? This upside-down, down-the-rabbit-hole existential quest for the adumbrative Cacciato, from the death-filled lakes of Vietnam to Laos through to India, Iran, Greece and – finally, absurdly – the streets of Paris.
Well, maybe.
I mean, it’s clear from the beginning that none of this pan-Asia quest is quite “real.” And as the book progresses, it sort of settles on you that O’Brien doesn't intend to ever really let you know what "real" would even mean.
After all, surely these soldiers did not just up and leave their posts and march across Asia in hunt of a deserter who thought he could walk to Paris? Surely not. Rather, we are made to believe that this is some sort of imagining in the mind of the protagonist, Paul Berlin – some sort of exploration of the possible and the impossible, of the region between dusk and dawn where death and war confuse the two in categorical terms.
But then again, who is the protagonist? He is just a figment of O’Brien’s, isn’t he? And so now it becomes less clear. The reader is as unable to separate “real” from “unreal” as Berlin is. What is fiction, after all, but an exploration of where the possible meets the impossible?
I get this far, fine, but I’m never very sure what O’Brien wants us to do with all this. Not that we have to do anything, mind you, but textual involution is no substitute for a plot arc, you know? And I have to admit, for about the middle 75-100 pages of this, we were deeply into three-star territory.
But O’Brien pulls out of it. And you know why? I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but O’Brien can write.
And so you emerge from the final page, having been suffused in some mystery that you never quite understood, but thankful for its evocation, and unwilling to trade the experience for something so mundane as clarity. -
In the whole of human history, I am of the extremely small percentage of males that did not fight in a war nor had my life changed as a result of one. I am extremely fortunate to have been twice lucky: born both where and born when. So whether it is a truth-seeking need to understand the sadness that countless men and women have had to endure, or it is some atavistic genetic tugging that keeps leading me back to these stories, I am addicted to the threnody of War.
Although I will read almost any non-fiction book on war that is recommended to me, it is fiction based upon events that really resonates. If you've read Vonnegut, you can chart his growth as an author through his first few books as he is circling around the main event - until he finally deals with his experience in the fire bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book that changes the reader because Kurt was changed by war. It's not a rational transaction. But neither is life.
Going After Cacciato is a book that has the capacity to re-wire the filters of a reader. The Vietnam War is the setting, but the individual wars suffered and fought daily by the soldiers is the narrative. The action follows a squad of men and their quixotic chase after a fellow soldier gone AWOL with plans to hoof it all the way to Paris from Indochina. As readers we become as changed as the soldiers on their journey. To explain further would be to ruin the magic - consider this great quote on the back cover of my edition, taken from a New York Times review: "To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales."
Virgil C. Dice, Jr. Ready for action.
My father was 26 years old when he was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He had just graduated with a masters in music and had planned on a career as a concert pianist. He and my mother planned on getting married as soon as he finished his graduate program - he petitioned his Congressman to change his enlistment date so they could keep to their plans. Dad never shared much about his experiences, but he did tell me that his deferment saved his life - the base where he was stationed was overrun a month prior to his arrival. In 1997 I made a trip to visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. I saw families and friends of fallen soldiers search for their beloved on the wall, watched them make a keep-sake of that name with a scrap of paper and rubbed charcoal. I took a picture of the book of names to note the fortune of the skip from Robert Floyd Dice to Anthony Dicesare.
Several years ago for my father's birthday I wrote him a short story. It was a fictional piece loosely based on what few things he told me about his war experience. I wasn't surprised when I asked him his opinion of the story that his response was, "There sure was a lot of swearing in there." I understand his deflection - I can't imagine how awful it must be for those people that have suffered from war to revisit it to create art. It makes what Tim O'Brien has done with this novel - and others like him throughout the ages - that much more amazing.
Final note: after finishing this book I called my father to ask him why, when he returned from the war, he didn't go back to his music career (he became an accountant). He said that after that much time away from practicing and focusing on his craft he would never be able to catch-up. He had a young wife and a family to think about. I'll always wonder now how different things would have been for him. He was blessed to escape from Vietnam without suffering casualty, but has the world suffered from not hearing his beautiful piano playing? -
“Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance.”
I know Tim O'Brien's go-to Vietnam war novel is The Things They Carried (which is really good); however for me, I think it will always be Going After Cacciato. The mythical quest of going after fellow soldier, Cacciato, who is reportedly leaving the war and walking to Paris, has a dream-like quality to it. This imaginative journey takes Paul Berlin and his platoon to nearly unimaginable places, but it never lets them escape the horrors of war. Beautifully written. It was great to meet the author of this wonderful novel a few years ago after he gave the keynote of a conference I was attending. I've readGoing After Cacciato at least four times, and it always resonates with me.
“You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.” -
Two stories unfold simultaneously in Going After Cacciato, one I was riveted by and another I felt alienated by. The disjointed nature of the novel didn't come as a shock; Tim O'Brien's masterpiece
The Things They Carried was a compilation of harrowing short stories penned between 1975 and 1990 on the subject of the Vietnam War. In this novel, published in 1978, O'Brien's attempt to contrast the external experiences of a young army specialist conscripted into the war while taking the reader into his imagination, where the possibilities of walking out of the war all the way to Paris are explored at length, didn't come together for me.
The novel begins with twenty-year-old Spec Four Paul Berlin surrounded by death and bad times while serving his Vietnam combat tour in October 1968. Much of his squad have been killed, three in tunnels, including a disliked lieutenant who insisted on obeying SOP. The new leader of Third Squad is Lieutenant Corson, a Korean War veteran though stricken with dysentery, is well-liked due to his adherence to "informal SOPs," permitting the men to destroy the tunnel networks they find rather than searching them. Their medic Doc Peret notifies the LT that a feeble-minded soldier known as Cacciato has left, having mentioned to Paul Berlin that he's headed for Paris. On foot.
Paul Berlin joins Doc, the LT and what's left of Third Squad as they head into the high country in pursuit of Cacciato. At point is a pugnacious southerner named Stink Harris. The squad's good humor man is Eddie Lazzutti. Sergeant Oscar Johnson is loved by virtue of his luck, having survived nine combat tours, though his claims that he's from Detroit are not believed by the other men. Harold Murphy is a heavy gunner who wants to turn back almost from the start, even as the squad quickly leaves the war and its dangers behind. They make visual contact with Cacciato, who seems committed to walking the 8,600 miles to Paris.
Humping to Paris, it was one of those crazy things Cacciato might try. Paul Berlin remembered how the kid had spent hours thumbing through an old world atlas, studying the maps, asking odd questions: How steep were these mountains, how wide was the river, how thick were these jungles? It was just too bad. A real pity. Like winning the Bronze Star for shooting out a dink's front teeth. Whistling in the dark, always whistling and smiling his frozen white smile. It was silly. It had always been silly, even during the good times, but now the silliness was sad. It couldn't be done. It just wasn't possible, and it was silly and sad.
Their mission to retrieve Cacciato apparently over, Third Squad is back in Quang Ngai on the coast of the South China Sea. Paul Berlin pulls arduous middle-hour guard and to occupy his mind, begins imagining the possibilities: what if they pursued Cacciato all the way to Paris? Spending six days marching through the jungle, the men hold a vote on whether to return to the war or keep going after Caccicato, facing desertion themselves. Harold Murphy disappears in the night, but the others keep going. Crossing into Laos, Stink shoots one of two water buffalo carrying a cart with three women in it, a young English speaking refugee named Sarkin Aung Wan and her two aunts.
While Lt. Corson wants to leave the women, Sarkin Aung Wan becomes compelled by the idea of traveling to Paris. She attaches herself to Paul Berlin and promises she can guide the squad to their destination. The specialist alternates between flights of fancy to remembrances his past: arriving in Chu Lai on June 3 and receiving woefully inadequate survival training, patrolling the villages of the muddy Song Tra Bong, getting lost in the woods as a child while at Indian Guides camp, his father in Fort Dodge, Iowa advising his son that while at war to focus on the good while ignoring the bad. Paul Berlin attempts this through his elaborate fantasy world.
Going After Cacciato is remarkably compelling when it comes to following Paul Berlin through his flesh and blood experiences in Vietnam. A lot of novelists are content to go from Plot Point A to Plot Point B, but what makes Tim O'Brien worth being studied is the vitality in his fiction. There are no straight lines in his stories, which soar and descend like the vital signs on a patient in intensive care. In the afterword, O'Brien maintains that rather than a war novel, he sees Going After Cacciato as a peace novel. Rather than adventure, it is well-calibrated toward the experiences of a soldier, taking us into his world and frame of mind.
"How many days you been at war?" asked Alpha's mail clerk, and Paul Berlin answered that he'd been at war seven days now.
The clerk laughed. "Wrong," he said. "Tomorrow, man, that's your first day at the war."
And in the morning PFC Paul Berlin boarded a resupply chopper that took him fast over charred pocked mangled country, hopeless country, green skies and speed and tangled grasslands and paddies and places he might die, a million possibilities. He couldn't watch. He watched his hands. He made fists of them, opening and closing the fists. His hands, he thought, not quite believing. His hands.
Very quickly, the helicopter banked and turned and went down.
"How long you been at the war?" asked the first man he saw, a wiry soldier with ringworm in his hair.
PFC Paul Berlin smiled. "This is it," he said. "My first day."
On page 76 it becomes clear that the walk to Paris exists only in the mind of Paul Berlin and while I could easily relate to why a dream like this would occur to a soldier, I didn't want to read it. I wanted to get back to the story where something was at stake. I don't like reading dream sequences and here too, I glazed over portions that take place in India or Afghanistan. Once the squad hits Paris, I was skipping pages. This concept might have been better serviced in a short story and while I recommend the novel for O'Brien's electrifying prose, as a novel, I think it half works. -
These were hard lessons, true, but they were lessons of ignorance: ignorant men, trite truths. What remained was a simple event. The facts, the physical things. A war like any war. No new messages. Stories that began and ended without transition. No developing drama or tension or direction. No order.
-- Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato
At the level of the grunt, the soldier, the dirt and the blood, who wouldn't want to run? Who wouldn't fantasize about just dropping everything and leaving the madness of war, the insanity of the Army, the brutality of killing and instead take an 8500+ mile trip to
Gay Paree?
It seems a rational choice: to choose freedom, happiness, liberty. To say cut it, cork it and just run. Leave the swamps of uncertainty, death, and fear behind you. Become a refugee from the carnage of Vietnam. Seek to relocate your tired ass to a place where dumb muthers aren't trying to shoot you. Find some piece of Earth where you aren't sleeping in holes, crawling into tunnels, worrying about whether the bullet that gets you will be audible. Get the hell out of Dodge.
If that was the extent of this novel's vision, it would be a pretty damn good book, but O'Brien tweaks it. He doesn't go for the easy answers. For every tick he gives you a tock. He finds ambiguity everywhere, conflict over each hill. It isn't a simple moral point to stay or go, to fight or to run. War has its own reality. It will exhaust you and then follow up. This confrontation with fear, death, loyalty, morality, friendship, leading, following, is key. The key to this novel is conflict. The conflict is key.
With lyrical beauty, flashbacks, and a magical realism that I've never experienced in a novel about the Vietnam War, O'Brien spins a story that is just that: a yarn, a spin, a giant fantasy race, a road movie, a Moby-Dick, a Danse Macabre, a metaphysical and very modern dance. It is a story of the good, the bad; those who run and those who follow. It is a literary shadow sculpture built out of the debris of war, the stories and cast-offs (the living and the dead).
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- Robert Farwell / Edward Jones library / Mesa, AZ 2014 -
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.
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The Things They Carried is still O'Brien's best, in my opinion, but Going After Cacciato is not far behind. The ease with which he elicits emotions and the deftness with which he changes them is amazing. When he describes a chopper ride into a hot LZ you can almost see, hear, and smell the experience. He can make painful passages (like Chapter 44) such an essential part of the story that you welcome the pain. Best of all is his ability to surprise you time after time with subtle twists and turns. Everybody should be reading Tim O'Brien's writing.
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This book is not for everyone. If you have trouble suspending disbelief or issues with magical realism, walk away now or read O'Brien's The Things They Carried. However, if you can just sit back and enjoy the ride as a master storyteller blurs the lines between reality and fantasy in such a way that there are no hard and fast truths (which is the point in most of O'Brien work), then you will most likely enjoy the experience. Going After Cacciato is less accessible than The Things They Carried because trying to discern the truth of what happens when Cacciato, a young soldier in Vietnam, chooses to go AWOL and walk all the way to Paris is difficult at best. A unit is dispatched to hunt Cacciato down, but encounters a number of bizarre twists and turns along the way (think Catch-22 meets Alice in Wonderland).
The narrative is split into three distinct time periods and told from the point of view of Paul Berlin. These distinct narratives focus on Berlin's first few months in the war, the hunt for Cacciato, and one night after the hunt for Cacciato is over (this occurs while Berlin is on night watch and thinking back to the hunt for Cacciato). The problem with making sense of the narrative comes from Paul Berlin himself--a young soldier ill-equipped to deal with the violence and atrocity of war, he uses his imagination to while away the tedious hours, as well as to re-create traumatic events with which he's not ready to cope. The point, however, is not what actually happens to Cacciato (in fact, upon a second reading, I found myself questioning the conclusion I came to after reading it for the first time), but how Berlin wisely or unwisely chooses to deal with events that are beyond his ability to control.
Cross posted at
This Insignificant Cinder -
My first opinion of this book is that I found it disappointing. This 336 page book is the first by the extremely talented, Vietnam veteran,
Tim O'Brien set during the Vietnam War.
Since O'Brien had experienced all the horrors of being an infantry soldier I was expecting a gritty account of a soldier's life.
How in the world this brilliant young man becomes an Infantry soldier is puzzling since only the lowest I.Q.'s were steered into this deadly occupation. A soldier with the lowest I.Q. could still have a lot of common sense which would make them excellent soldiers, if properly lead, but poor O'Brien must've been a fish out of water to begin with.
The story is told by Private Paul Berlin, a new arrival to his infantry company as he muses over his past experiences in Vietnam while relating his present circumstances.
Berlin's present storyline is confusing to say the least as a few members of his company are tasked with finding the AWOL soldier, Cacciato, who is heading overland for Paris to escape the horrors of war.
The whole company had been traumatized as their buddies have one by one met horrible deaths in battle and Cacciato has apparently gone over the deep end.
As Berlin relates the current task of finding Cacciato he muses over each and every death in gory, horrific detail.
Things become very confusing as they continue their quest into Laos without reporting to their commander where they are going. They liberally begin to spend money all along the journey chasing Cacciato to Paris. Where is this money coming from?
This and other peculiarities made me start wondering:Are they really dead and don't know it?
Have the horrors of war made Berlin lose his mind and is he relating his tale while undergoing psychiatric therapy?
The good news is that O'Brien has enormous talent and I would definitely read more of his books.
Anyone curious about the Vietnam War will find this book interesting and educational as O'Brien makes that era come to life with realistic characters that are unique and memorable. -
کتاب خوبی بود و داستان افراد داخل جنگ رو خوب به تصویر کشیده بود. جزئیاتش مناسب بود، خشونتش بیش از حد نبود و پیام های اخلاقی خوبی در راستای جنگ داشت. اینکه چطور زندگی های مردم این میان بدون دلیل خاصی نابود شد. نثرش ساده بود و خواندنش هم سریع بود، داستان اونقدر گیرا بود که موقع خواندن مرز بین این دنیا و کتاب رو گم میکردی. سیستم روایتش بیشتر شیفت زمانی بود و عقب، جلو میرفت. با کارکترها به راحتی میشد همدردی و همزادپنداری کرد. پایان خوب و مناسبی هم داشت.
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So I read this book almost 8 years ago in the book format and gave it three stars. And I just finished it in September 2020 in the audible format and I am upping it to four stars. The book was first published in 1978 and apparently the audible was finished in 2011. I found the book to be at times dragging and at other times dazzling. It really improved once I figure it out the switching back-and-forth from real Time to Real imagining. There is not so much of the jungle fighting that you get used to in Vietnam war stories. But there are plenty of paddies and enough war is hell blood and guts. There are some excellent moments of reflection. I am plenty glad that I listen to this book so long after I first read it. I have to admit I have no recollection of reading this book other than the words that I wrote at that time.
I want to mention that the Kindle book has an interesting after word Q&A with the author. Also an interesting readers guide at the end of the Kindle book.
**********************that was one of the jokes. There was a joke about Oscar. There were many jokes about Billy Boy Watkins, the way he’d collapsed of fright on the field of battle. Another joke was about the lieutenant’s dysentery, and another was about Paul Berlin’s purple biles. There were jokes about the postcard pictures of Christ that Jim Pederson used to carry, and Stink’s ringworm, and the way Buff’s helmet filled with life after death. Some of the jokes were about Cacciato. Dumb as a bullet, Stink said. Dumb as a month-old oyster fart, said Harold Murphy.
This book is no joke. But you may find yourself laughing in spite of knowing that nothing in it is funny. It’s way too awful to be funny. Surreal page after page, dreams and nightmares, confusion and terror. All of these: strange, weird, odd, unreal, dreamlike, fantastic, bizarre.
Here is what some other GR reviewers had to say about this book:Brilliant, hallucinatory and hypnotic, the narrative jumps around, jumbling continuity, reality, fear, duty and dreams as it deftly and completely messes with your head.
Source:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
…
O’Brien brilliantly portrays Berlin’s story of Vietnam through fragments and an array of possibilities that cleverly leaves the reader’s mind open to many avenues of understanding and interpretation.
Source:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
…
Cacciato -- "dumb as milk" but always ahead, always out of reach -- leads them through a surreal landscape of rabbithole logic as if they were newly dead spirits trying to find their way in the fog of an unfamiliar netherworld.
Source:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
So you get the idea that you have to have a flexible brain to read and enjoy this book, don’t you? You have to learn to drift along with the often illogical story but to be prepared for regular bits of realism. What does it take to be a heroic soldier in a war zone?The blond-headed lieutenant watched him climb. Though he did not know the soldier’s name, this did not matter much, for the soldiers whose names he did not know he simply called Soldier or Trooper, whichever came to him first, and there was nothing impersonal or degrading about either word. He watched the boy’s strange mechanical walk, the lazy obscurity of each step, the ploddingness, and he felt both sadness and pride. He saw the boy as a soldier. Maybe not yet a good soldier, but still a soldier. He saw him as part of a whole, as one of many soldiers pressed together by the force of mission. The lieutenant was not stupid. He knew these beliefs were unpopular. He knew in his society, and many of the men under his own command, did not share them. But he did not ask his men to share his views, only to comport themselves like soldiers. So watching Paul Berlin’s dogged climb, its steadiness and persistence, the lieutenant felt great admiration for the boy, admiration and love combined. He secretly urged him on. For the sake of mission, yes, and for the welfare of the platoon. But also for the boy’s own well-being, so that he might feel the imperative to join the battle and to win it.
A bit of rah rah! And what did it all mean?After the war, perhaps, he might return to Quang Ngai. Years and years afterward. Return to track down the girl with gold hoops through her ears. Bring along an interpreter. And then, with the war ended, history decided, he would explain to her why he had let himself go to war. Not because of strong convictions, but because he didn’t know. He didn’t know who was right, or what was right; he didn’t know if it was a war of self-determination or self-destruction, outright aggression or national liberation; he didn’t know which speeches to believe, which books, which politicians; he didn’t know if nations would topple like dominoes or stand separate like trees; he didn’t know who really started the war, or why, or when, or with what motives; he didn’t know if it mattered, he saw sense in both sides of the debate, but he did not know where truth lay; he didn’t know if Communist tyranny would prove worse in the long run than the tyrannies of Ky or Thieu or Khanh – he simply didn’t know. And who did? Who really did? He couldn’t make up his mind. Oh, he had read the newspapers and magazines. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t uninformed. He just didn’t know if the war was right or wrong. And who did? Who really knew? So he went to the war for reasons beyond knowledge. Because he believed in law, and law told him to go. Because it was a democracy, after all, and because LBJ and the others had rightful claim to their offices. He went to the war because it was expected. Because not to go was to risk censure, and to bring embarrassment on his father and his town. Because, not knowing, he saw no reason not to trust those with more experience. Because he loved his country and, more than that, because he trusted it. Yes, he did. Oh, he would have rather fought with his father in France, knowing certain things certainly, but he couldn’t choose his war, nobody could. Was this so banal? Was this so unprofound and stupid? He would look the little girl with the gold earrings straight in the eye. He would tell her these things. He would ask her to see the matter his way. What would she have done? What would anyone have done, not knowing? And then he would ask the girl questions. What did she want? How did she see the war? What were her aims – peace, any peace, peace with dignity? Did she refuse to run for the same reasons he refused – obligation, family, the land, friends, home? And now? Now, war ended, what did she want? Peace and quiet? Peace and pride? Peace with mashed potatoes and Swiss steak and vegetables, a full-tabled peace, indoor plumbing, a peace with Oldsmobiles and Hondas and skyscrapers climbing from the fields, a peace of order and harmony and murals on public buildings? Were her dreams the dreams of ordinary men and women? Quality-of-life dreams? Material dreams? Did she want a long life? Did she want medicine when she was sick, food on the table and reserves in the pantry? Religious dreams? What? What did she aim for? If a wish were to be granted by the war’s winning army – any wish – what would she choose?
Does gen-x or gen-y or gen-z get it? Is it just the baby boomers who remember Vietnam? And who waded into Iraq and Afghanistan in spite of that? Is Going After Cacciato just nostalgia, a lesson unlearned? Is this book from 1978 best left in 1978?
Being a winner of the National Book Award of 1979 doesn’t garner this book any extra points from me. I have been impressed by
Tim O Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods and The Things They Carried but less so with Tomcat in Love and If I Die in a Combat Zone. I have July, July on my bookshelf to read one day. So, I guess you could say that I am a fan of Tim O’Brien who has not loved all his work. But I seem to keep coming back for more. Three stars for this one with some significant chunks of four star quality. Any book that suggests the absurdity of war has some star quality as far as I am concerned. -
Going After Cacciato
O’Brien is the pre-eminent writer of the American soldier’s experience in Vietnam. This novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979.
A soldier Cacciato goes AWOL while on patrol in Vietnam. He tells the squad that he’s had enough of the horror and is going to walk to Paris, France. We learn that the squad is determined to hunt him down even across the continent. It shortly becomes clear that the search is really a fantasy in one of the soldier’s head who is jealous of Caciatto’s plan. This surviving soldier’s fantasy is interspersed with the realistic, and often horrific, experiences of what happened to wipe out half the squad in the weeks prior.
One of the most powerful chapters in this novel, or any other war novel, was entitled Landing Zone Bravo. Pedersen, one of the squad members, is scared of heights and freaks out as they head to the landing zone. When the chopper lands the crew chief has to shove Pedersen out of the chopper into the rice paddies. The whole area is taking heavy fire. Pedersen is shot in the leg moments after landing and then shot again. He is unable to continue. It seems that he has been shot inadvertently or even intentionally by the gunners from his own chopper. Pedersen composes himself and begins to shoot back at the chopper as it leaves the zone. He makes several directs hit into the fuselage leading the reader to believe that it may crash. Instead the chopper flies over Pedersen and he continues to fire until the chopper is just a shadow against the setting sun. This chapter and others highlight the plight of the infantryman and the lack of a clear line between the VietCong soldiers and American soldiers as they experience many of the same horrors.
4.5 stars. This novel is on par with The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s blockbuster compilation of Vietnam short stories. The writing here borders on the beautiful and flows really well. In part because O’Brien describes the scenes and imagery without going overboard on the short choppy vernacular often used in other Vietnam books. -
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. -
From the start, the narrator, a young soldier from Iowa named Paul Berlin, counts off all the soldiers he’s known that have died during his deployment in Nam. Knowing them only by their nicknames, as he does, what we get feels impersonal at first, but as the story goes on, his memories become more and more personal about how those deaths affected him. A dreamer, young and innocent, Paul Berlin isn’t a reliable narrator, but he’s telling us his tale, not reciting history, and so this is okay.
This isn’t a “definitive” novel about the Vietnam War, but as the author says, every soldier remembers different things about every battle, and there will be as many versions of a war as there are soldiers. Paul Berlin’s story is small and personal, even as he and his platoon march west sort of chasing the AWOL Cacciato (another member of the platoon), in a slightly hallucinatory, dreamlike journey. Some of the story is hard to believe, but as Paul says again and again from his “observation post”, no one back home would believe the truth anyway.
A solid 3 and a half stars. -
First things first. If you want to read a book about the war in Viet Nam, only one, make it this one.
It's 1969, and Cacciato, a soldier in the US Army, has had enough. He deserts, leaving clues for the other men in his unit indicating that he's decided to walk to Paris. Now they're obligated to go after him, to follow him until he's captured. And if that happens to take them to Paris, that's fine with them.
It's 1969, and Paul Berlin is a Private First Class in the Viet Nam War. On guard duty at the top of a tower, he watches the sea, reviews his experiences so far, and tries to run away inside his head, far far away, from all the terrible things he's seen and done. To find the good mixed in with all the bad, as his father suggested.
I read about World War II all the time. There were two sides. One was good and one was evil. The good guys knew what they were fighting for. The bad guys…well, the very best one can say about them is that they were led by bad men. It is a war that is easy to understand, to appreciate. And when soldiers died, they died in the service of something greater than themselves, a mission to save humanity from unspeakable madness.
But the Viet Nam War was something else. Going After Cacciato is an anti-war novel in the pattern of All Quiet On the Western Front. By the time you come to the end of this hauntingly beautiful, evocative novel, Tim O’Brien will illuminate for you exactly what was wrong with this war, and how different it was from the ones we had fought before.
I am left with a kaleidoscope of sensory overload. The feel of high, unmoving green grass brushing against my legs, the fetid smell of the rice paddies. The fatigue from the endless march, the red dust of the dirt path on my boots, the mercury color of the sky and sea, the awful knowledge of the terrible ways a man can die. The unreadable expressions on the faces of the people we are there to help. The alien landscape, littered with enemy corpses, pitted and charred after the US Army firebombs it. The sound a personnel mine makes when a man walks over it. The pervasive gnawing of fear. -
Inseguendo Cacciato è uno di quei libri che non avrei scelto di persona (chissà perchè la guerra del Vietnam non mi ha mai attratto come tanti altri tragici eventi bellici), ma che ho deciso di leggere lasciandomi attrarre da alcuni bei commenti che ho trovato qui. Un buon libro, devo dire, anche se faccio fatica a credere che sia il miglior libro mai scritto su quella guerra, come dice la copertina.
La guerra del Vietnam, anche per ragioni biografiche, ha impresso un marchio sulla mia infanzia. Erano gli anni '80 e agli USA bruciava ancora, e tanto quella scottatura (qualcuno sostiene che non siano stati in grado di superarla neppure adesso). E nel tentativo di sedare il dolore e l'umiliazione hollywood ci bombardava di film, alcuni dei quali vuoti e di puro intrattenimento (come dimenticare il mitico Rambo), ma altri che sono stati degli autentici capolavori, penso a Full Metal Jacket o Apocalipse now. E penso anche a NAM, la prima e unica pubblicazione in fascicoli che la mia famiglia sia stata in grado di portare a termine spinta anche dalla forte polarizzazione politica che c'era in quegli anni su questo tema, nella quale la mia famiglia era caduta in pieno.
Ecco. "Inseguendo Cacciato" in un modo scritto molto bene, con un immaginario potente ma non fumettistico, mi ha restituito la stessa impressione di quegli anni: una guerra terribile ma ipnotica, che ha qualcosa di onirico, di sfuggente, di deviante, come visto sotto gli effetti di una droga. E non solo perchè gli anni sessanta sono stati e li ricordiamo come gli anni dello psichedelismo e della fuga dalla realtà, ma proprio perchè il Vietnam per il soldato americano ha portato al massimo la spinta verso lo straniamento più totale. Il soldato americano non sapeva dov'era, non sapeva perchè stava combattendo, non sapeva chi stava combattendo e non sapeva come stava combattendo. I marines marciavano, sudavano, soffrivano le pene di un inferno verde, contavano i giorni per tornare, sognavano una fuga, morivano. E basta. Non c'era altro che il sopravvivere laggiù, è evidente che contro un avversario che era forse il più motivato che avessero incontrato nella loro storia non potevano vincere. Ed infatti non hanno vinto.
Fuggire, salvarsi. In ogni modo. Questo vuole fare il fante imprigionato nella guerra della giungla (e nella trincea? E nella steppa innevata?) fuggire anche attraverso il sogno, il delirio della droga. E credo che la storia di questo libro, che è la storia di un sogno dentro ad un sogno, la storia di un inseguimento che è anche una fuga, che è anche una redenzione, renda molto bene ciò che ha reso il Vietnam una guerra abbastanza diversa da tutte le altre. Un sogno dentro ad un sogno dal quale emerge, improvvisa e brutale come una pugnalata, la guerra vera. Quella disumana, sanguinaria, sconvolgente. Come essere svegliati da una frustata, o da un secchio di acqua bollente.
Grande idea, ottimi i dialoghi, buone alcune le descrizioni, un po'annacquata la storia. Scene e caratteri ripetitivi che si snodano per un libro troppo lungo, caratterizzazione dei personaggi abbastanza marginale. Se fosse stato un po' meno lungo, se ci fosse stata magari un po' più di guerra, a costo di vedere tradito in minima parte il senso di straniamento e di fuga del fante che è il vero tema del libro, alle quattro stelle ci arrivava. Così, ad arrivare all'ultima pagina ho fatto un po' fatica. -
After reading, The Things They Carried, I immediately ran down to the library to check out O’Brien’s earlier writing, Going After Cacciato. And maybe my expectations were too high, but I was very disappointed in this writing. The Things They Carried was written in such a sophisticated manner. Going After Cacciato seemed jagged and forced. I really can’t see what was so special about this book that it was nominated for a bunch of rewards. I can only guess that there was a severe shortage of novels in 1979 when it was published. Maybe someone would tell me that I didn’t get it, that I missed the message or the symbolism. Oh no, I got the message. I just didn’t like the prose used to deliver it. One of the most unremarkable stories I’ve read in a long time.
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3,75
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AWARDS:
Winner of the National Book Award, 1979.
"To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales," - New York Times.
I have a hard time reading war stories or watching war movies and not feeling angry or upset afterward. There are a couple exceptions. Like Terrence Malick's, 'The Thin Red Line.' Or Tim O'Brien's stories. War stories that are about death and horrific violence, but also about life, about falling in love, and fucking, and relationships, and the people that came before you, and the people that will come after you, and things that we are ashamed of, and things that are vulgar, and things that you understand spiritually.... One monstrous, medly. Terrible and beautiful.
An excerpt from, 'Going After Cacciato.' [CONTEXT: It's 1968, the thick of the U.S.-Vietnam Conflict. The protagonist, PFC Paul Berlin, and a group of new recruits have just arrived in Vietnam to begin their tour of duty.]:
"In the morning the fifty new men were marched to a wooden set of bleachers facing the sea. A small, sad-faced corporal in a black cadre helmet waited until they settled down, looking at the recruits as if searching for a lost friend in a crowd. Then the corporal sat down in the sand. He turned away and gazed out to sea. He did not speak. Time passed slowly, ten minutes, twenty, but still the sad-faced corporal did not turn or nod or speak. He simply gazed out at the blue sea. Everything was clean. The sea was clean, and the sand and the wind.
They sat in the bleachers for a full hour.
Then at last the corporal sighed and stood up. He checked his wristwatch. And again he searched the rows of new faces.
'All right,' he said softly. 'That completes your first lecture on how to survive this shit. I hope you paid attention.'
During the days they simulated search and destroy missions in a friendly little village just outside [Chu Lai].... PFC Paul Berlin, who wanted to live, took the exercises seriously.
'You VC?' he demanded of a little girl with braids. 'You dirty VC?' The girl smiled. 'Shit, man,' she said gently. 'You shittin me?'" -
An interesting, memorable war novel set in the late 1960s in Vietnam. Paul Berlin was drafted to be a soldier in Vietnam. He recalls his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, mainly focussing on his comrades and the tragedy of seeing a number of soldiers he knew die. Paul reflects on his life and his lack of purpose and learnings through his war experiences. Whilst at an observation point in Vietnam, he drifts off to sleep and dreams about the tracking down of a fellow soldier named Cacciato, who had disappeared. Cacciato had always stated that he was going to go to Paris. Berlin with his Lieutenant and five other soldiers follow Cacciato in order to capture him and bring him back to their camp.
A worthwhile read, however OBrien’s linked short stories collection, ‘The Things They Carried’, - about life as a USA soldier in Vietnam, is a more powerful and insightful novel and highly recommended.
‘Going After Cacciato’ won the 1979 National Book Award. -
Annals of Coincidence, entry #1: I met Kareem a few days after New Year's in New York, at a restaurant we both like. It was a Tuesday; I think it was around 1pm. It was one of those wonderful, finite number of weekdays when I didn't have to work. As we ate and drank beer, Kareem told me about the book he'd been reading and enjoying, The World According to Garp, by John Irving, which I've never read. Heard the title a few times over the years, heard the name John Irving, didn't know one had written the other. After eating, I suggested we go looking for a bookstore that I remembered being located around that general area. It was so cold out that after five minutes you wanted to go inside- somewhere, anywhere. But we found the bookstore; it's a long, narrow place below street level with wooden shelves and a trailer in the back. This old edition of Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien has the kind of cover you just don't see anymore. There's a stake planted in the ground with two arrows pointed in opposite directions: “Saigon”, and “Paris, 8,600 miles.” There’s also a line of soldiers, a large plant suggestive of jungle, a full moon, and a man’s face; it looks as if he’s dreaming or remembering these things. The only thing I've ever read by Tim O'Brien is The Things They Carried, which I remember thinking was just okay, except for the one unforgettable anecdote about a guy who somehow gets his American girlfriend to come over to Vietnam. She (the girlfriend) starts to spend time with members of the special forces, and after a few weeks goes out on patrol with them. Finally, she disappears; the boyfriend finds her in one of the special forces’ cabins, naked except for a necklace of human tongues. Tongues or maybe ears. I assumed this book was also nonfiction about Vietnam.
Another thing about the store is that they don’t accept cards. Kareem offered to spot me $4, and I bought him coffee afterwards. What's that you say, a cup of coffee almost never costs $4? True enough; I'll have to buy him another coffee, or a $2 book, or two $1 books, next time I see him, which was supposed to be last week, but wasn't. Once we were seated, I opened the book and read the first few lines aloud: "It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker..."
"Sounds like a novel", Kareem said.
"Hmm."
Is it a novel about a guy (Cacciato, I assume) who tries to walk from Vietnam to Paris? The possibility reminds me of two people: Richard Swanson, who a few years ago tried to walk from Seattle to Sao Paulo, for the World Cup, and was hit by a car and killed in Oregon; and Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan and was held by the Taliban for five years. My sympathy is instinctively with someone like Bergdahl (not knowing the full story), and so my fear about this book is that it won't challenge that sympathy; and that Cacciato will be some romantic, childlike, Forrest Gump kind of character who is too pure for the war. We'll see.
Oh, here's the coincidental part. A few days after purchasing the book (or after Kareem purchased it for me, rather), I noticed this little yellow banner along the top: "Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction." Sounds prestigious. And possibly something else that should have indicated to me that it's a novel. Just for fun, I went online and looked up the list of National Book Award winners, for fiction. Going After Cacciato won the award in 1979, beating out four other nominees, including...The World According to Garp, by John Irving. -
“In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a was is ended it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers.”
This was my second time reading a work by Tim O'Brien, the first time being a few years ago when I read
The Things They Carried. I loved that book (I mean, I still love it). It was assigned reading for my junior-year English class, and I thought I would hate it because I'd never been a fan of war literature. However, I was soon to learn that Tim O'Brien is not the typical war-lit writer. In fact, The New York Times said of Going After Cacciato, "To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales." And I think this quote could easily apply to The Things They Carried as well. It was a book that took place during war, but the story is really is more about humanity. More than that, it also changed the way I think about storytelling.
That said, I thought Going After Cacciato was a great book, but it didn't move me the same way The Things They Carried did.
Anyway, let's explain the story a bit. Going After Cacciato is about a young soldier in the Vietnam war, who decides to get up and leave in the middle of the war and walk all the way to Paris. As the title of the novel implies, a group of his fellow soldiers decide to go after him. Of course, what follows is a crazy journey.
The best part of this book is Tim O'Brien's writing. I just can't get over how well he writes. It's just so powerful, so simple and yet so complex, so full of emotion and imagery. He really puts you right into the story, and he makes you see things in a different light.
On top of that, I love how surreal this story is. There's a certain, almost dreamlike quality to it, where at times it's not quite clear what's real and what isn't.
However, as I've said, this book ultimately wasn't as meaningful to me as The Things They Carried was. I'm not sure what it was about this book ... I think maybe what I liked more about The Things They Carried was that it was made up of shorter stories that all connected in some way, and each of those stories was concise and had a strong impact. And even though there are different little stories throughout Going After Cacciato, it does still follow a more conventional storyline. And it's not like that's a bad thing, but I felt that it wasn't quite as compatible with O'Brien's style. I don't know, maybe that's just me.
Basically, I thought the focus of this book wandered a bit and there were parts where I was a little bored. However, O'Brien never fails to captivate me with his writing and with the strong imagery he creates. -
(Mild spoiler that reveals no details)
I don't think I'll ever get over this book. I did not see this book's resolution coming. I had no idea what I was getting into.
The very mention that this book has a twist, I believe, is a spoiler in itself. Hence the spoiler warning.
Twist is an unsuitable word for what Cacciato does. A twist calls to mind a last second reveal of the true antagonist, or some such detail for shock value at the very end of a story. This book does something so much mightier.
Cacciato upends your world.
The twist ranks among the most emotive narrative ploys I've ever read, perhaps better even than Life of Pi. The book's story, indeed the whole art of storytelling and literature and human imagination, is given new understanding. It simultaneously magnifies and diminishes you.
More thoughts to come. -
The subjective nature of life and reality has driven people to seek objective counsel in religion, astrology, spirituality, or any other source that claims some kind of sturdiness in a world of uncertainty. Theodor Adorno, a twentieth century philosopher, suggests that literature shouldn’t play to this weakness of the mind for “completeness and continuity” which follows an “epistemological impulse”. Getting at truth means exposing different angles, even if they contradict. “Reality is fragmentary”, to present one answer is a misrepresentation. Multiple perspectives are what fuel thought, so that ultimately the written word doesn’t act as though it’s figured itself out.
Nothing can be truer of Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, in which the main character Paul Berlin finds himself on a constant quest for answers in a reality of contradictions and subjectivity. O’Brien brilliantly portrays Berlin’s story of Vietnam through fragments and an array of possibilities that cleverly leaves the reader’s mind open to many avenues of understanding and interpretation.
The Book is divided into three prominent parallels. The present time, memories of the war, and the tale of chasing Cacciato, which takes place in Paul Berlin’s imagination. All of these are interspersed within the novel. While the present and his imaginary tale are recited chronologically, the actual war events get mangled out of a distinct timeline.
O’Brien also poses an array of questions: can a soldier escape war through imagination? Does war have it’s own identity separate from individual war stories? Are we to be against this war? Is there a purpose? And so on.
These questions are never directly answered. In fact, the novel is presented with dueling perspectives and contradictions, none of which seem to receive any precedence or emphasis. Perhaps O’Brien himself doesn’t claim to know, and perhaps he implicitly asks us to take on Adorno’s philosophy: to reflect on its complexity, and accept this very quality as a characteristic of war’s reality: That there’s a storm of questions, but no one right answer to shelter us. The truth is a synthesis of contradictions and perspectives.
In many ways this portrayal of war offers a tension between Apollonian Tendencies (notions of identity and individuality) and Barbarian Dionysian (de-individuation and the complete loss of oneself) as displayed in classical Greek Tragedies. Though they are opposite tendencies, they can exist simultaneously, especially in war. There exist the individuals, who differ in perception and personality, but are thrown into a situation that causes de-individuation, anonymity, and often “mob brutality”. Paul Berlin relates how at times it was easier to use people’s symbolic names, or just remember them in songs, for de-individuating them mollifies the burden of their grotesque death.
This is the reality of war to O’Brien, and reality as an object to Adorno. It has it’s own “inner coherence” and “harmony” that is only misconstrued by attempting to undermine it’s complex nature via “an overarching concept”. At the close of the novel the reader is not meant to have any presumptuous solutions, but rather bask in the limbo of its humility, so that through some miracle of fiction, the author manages to inject in the reader a vague dose of the haunting confusion, and psychological labyrinth that only a soldier knows. -
This is a tough book to give five stars to. Not because it isn't worthy, but because it is bound to be misleading. Going after Cacciato begins innocently enough. We meet Paul Berlin, a private in Vietnam and we meet his squadmates and we begin to see the struggles and the triumphs of these men. Then Cacciato, a happy idiot along the lines of Chancy the gardener (from the film Being There) who decides he's had enough and he's going to walk the 8,600 miles to France. Thus begins the chase and thus begins the book in earnest.
Going After Cacciato is a book about the war. It is a war that not that many people agree about and fewer people understand. And so Paul Berlin is not a reliable narrator. He knows he is not reliable, but he is attempting to straighten out the facts and to understand them. Also, however, he is trying to deceive himself. This makes for some surprising reading. The book takes a series of more and more surprising turns that begin to make the reader question what, exactly is going on. What is going on, however, is a war that is a just as crazy.
Is this an anti-war book? Sure. It's certainly not pro-war. I would argue that it seems to be, instead, a representation of the war as it was perceived, both by the soldiers as well as the public. It succeeds amazingly, both in its representations of the real and the unreal. It is confusing, but with reason and it will become clear to the astute reader who pushes forward. -
Similar in approach to The Things They Carried, but not nearly as successful, largely because in trying to get around the problem of how to write a war story about a war as metaphysically unhinged as Vietnam, O'Brien settles here on the weary kelson of the hallucinogenic, it-was-all-a-dream plot that, by its very architectonics, evacuates all the drama from the drama and leaves behind little but the words themselves. For a writer like Pynchon, or Joyce, this might succeed. But O'Brien's success in The Things They Carried stems from pathos. That book succeeds by showing how the soldier's pain blurs the factuality of his storytelling, and his inability to tell the straight story of Vietnam heightens that book's dramatic energy, instead of deflating it.
