Saturday, October 8, 2011
Tim O'Brien: "The Things They Carried" and "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong"
At the 2009 National Book Festival, an interviewer from the NEA asked Tim O'Brien, "Why read?" And he answered: I can't speak for everybody; I can tell you why I do. I have a need to enter other worlds that aren't entirely my own. And by other worlds, I mean other personalities and other mindsets and geographically other places where I might be living there's an otherness that beckons to me that- and the otherness shines light on what I'm living or going through. It is not- you get trapped in your own problems and your own intricacies of your own life so you don't see them beyond them much, as least I have trouble. And a book or a magazine article or any piece of art can shine a kind of light on my own situation and I'm seeing it through another lens. And it might be the lens of a history book or the lens of another novel or poem and there's a little sunlight there, explosion that goes on in my heart where the otherness is attached to my own life in some way or another. Sometimes it's just to draw a tear from my eye and feel that someone is sharing the kind of pain I might be sharing or has gone through it or someone has experienced a job that somehow validates my own joys.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
As a nonfiction writer (sometimes), Tim O'Brien's biography page in Doubletakes stuck out to me. He wrote memoirs about his time in Vietnam, but it struck me that he didn't then think that subject was off-limits for his fiction. I know we're told to write what we know, but I've had trouble deciding what that means or how much of what we know to write as fiction, and I think that O'Brien is a good example of how to do this well. I would have to read his memoir to find out if any of these people are based off of real characters in his own life, but I find myself not minding either way. The detail in these pieces is astounding, and it's O'Brien's firsthand knowledge of the war that makes it seem real to me.
ReplyDeleteIt also struck me that like the Lydia Davis pieces we read, "The Things They Carried" was a lot of summary, until about halfway through when more dialogue enters. But I didn't mind in this piece the way I minded in Davis's "St. Martin." Because there is so much specific detail and imagery (it's not all in the mind of one person), I was pulled in and kept there.
Tim O'Brien's stories really play with time a lot. Especially with Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. I thought how they really play back and forth from the telling of the story and back to what is actually happening in the story. It felt a lot like The Princess Bride, how the grandfather tells the story and then you see the actors play it out. He also uses summary really well in both stories which makes it feel like there is a lot more underneath.
ReplyDeleteI think that I will take this idea of oral story away. I know I said that about Wideman but I really mean it this time. This whole concept of saving the spoken word in writing and then using the writing to be read or memorized just as an oral story would normally.